Leadership Framework

Why do some campaigns work and others don’t?

Campaigns succeed when they can train organizers (Han XXX; Ganz XXX).

Organizing is a form of leadership, where you work with community to turn their resources into the power they need to achieve change they want. Organizing is not creating services for grateful clients or marketing products to customers. Nor is about charity which asks what is wrong, how can I help, but rather is about justice which asks why is it happening and how can I change it.

As Ganz describes, disorganized groups face challenges of

• apathy - not motivated, people not engaged, don’t show up;

• division - not united, don’t have the capacity to act together, to debate and argue and then commit;

• drift - not purposeful, don’t have a sense of how to work together;

• reactiveness - no initiative, but simply reacting to events; and

• inertia - no change, not taking effective action.

How do organizers help groups overcome these challenges? They create:

• shared story through personal narratives to turn apathy to motivation;

• shared relationships that connect people into community to turn division into unity;

• shared structure by forming teams with shared purpose, clear roles, responsibility and processes to turn drift into purpose;

• shared strategy that turns reactiveness into initiative; and

• shared discipline of execution that turns inertia into measurable action toward change.

These leadership skills can be taught and learned. The PB Evanston leadership curriculum is arranged to help you develop these 5 abilities.

Watch Marshal Ganz on disorganization and leadership.

As he describes in his organizing story, Marshal Ganz participated in the Freedom Summer and Cesar Chavez’s Farm Workers movement before becoming a faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy school, and later contributing to the organizing strategy for the Howard Dean Campaign, the Sierra Club, and Obama for America.