Marshall Ganz Public Disclosure

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Transparent Engagement

As a school dedicated to solving real world public problems, we recognize the strong value of faculty engagement with public and private actors outside of HKS. The school seeks to advance and strengthen our connections to the world of practice in both its scholarship and teaching. We will continue to promote and support these activities as appropriate.

At the same time, as a school dedicated to advancing the public interest, the reputations of individual faculty members, the School, the University, and the credibility of our work itself can be damaged by potential conflicts of interest. To address this, the University and the School have adopted a set of disclosure and conflict of interest policies. Such policies aim to balance the value of involvement with the real world actors we seek to understand, the legitimate desire of the public for transparency, and the autonomy and privacy interests of individual members of the faculty. A simple summary of our goal is "transparent engagement."

This website is one of many tools available to HKS faculty to facilitate public disclosure of their outside professional activities.

Outside Professional Activities For Marshall Ganz

The Leading Change Network

The Leading Change Network (LCN) is a community of practice: organizers, educators, and researchers committed to developing leadership, continual learning, and creating capacity. LCN emerged from efforts to address three critical needs:

Recruiting, training, and developing organizing leadership. Youthful organizers are emerging across diverse domains around the world. In the Middle East, for example, young people who compose a major portion of the population are struggling to translate their capacity for mobilization into their capacity for organization. In the United States, constituencies pushing for action on climate change need focus. Colleges and universities largely ignore their responsibility to equip students with the tools for effective civic engagement.

Supporting systematic continual learning across the field. Despite their creativity, energy, and hard work, with some exceptions, organizers often move from one campaign to the next without systematically reflecting on their learning, capturing the lessons, and adapting their practices accordingly. This inhibits their learning, the training they can offer others, and the development of the field as a whole. At present, scholarly research contributes little to the improvement of organizing practice, while the needs of practitioners count little on the agenda of researchers.

Creating greater capacity for organizing in key constituencies. The potential of constituencies strategically oriented toward “change”, whether defined by issue, region, or values, could be more fully realized by encouraging development of their own organizing capacity. The New Organizing Institute, for example, has begun to play this role among younger online and offline organizers in the US. Similar “nodes of practice” can be developed around other issues such as climate change—or in other places, such as the Balkans. Nodes of practice can also be developed around other domains, such as communities of faith and health care. Sharing experience across domains, geographical locations, or issues can encourage the development of greater capacity within all.

Marshall Ganz has been on The Leading Change Network's Board of Directors and the Leadership Team since April 2012.