Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. My name is Yort Young. I'm the director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities, and we're so excited to welcome so many of you here for a wonderful event with Professor Marshall Gans and Dean Erica Chenoweth. We're here to celebrate the book "People, Power, Change" that Marshall wrote. He's coming off a worldwide tour promoting the book, but now he's here — we have him. Marshall is a faculty affiliate of the Bloomberg Center for Cities. The center is dedicated to advancing knowledge on urban problem solving and city leadership around the world. And Marshall has trained over 350 mayors that have gone through our program over the past 10 years in the art and science of storytelling.
Today, we're going to talk about a much broader perspective that Marshall has developed over the past decades of democratic renewal organizing practice. He's trained generations of organizers, and he's going to share his thoughts on where we are today and what is important into the future as we think about democratic renewal. We're also extremely honored to have as our moderator today Dean Erica Chenoweth here at Kennedy School. They are a political scientist specialized in democratic action, democratic resilience, civic discourse, and much more. So I can't think of a better combination of expertise here in front of us than these two guests and colleagues.
Before we get started, a warm welcome to everybody who's joining on Zoom. I believe there's hundreds of people tuning in, and you can ask questions using the Q&A feature on Zoom. We will moderate that, and Dean Chenoweth will bring those questions into the conversation as well. If you are here in person, then there are two microphones, one here and I think one on that side, and so just raise your hand and introduce yourself and make sure it is a question and not a statement.
Then finally, there are two exits here in the case of an emergency. The first exit is the main entrance through which you came in, and there's another entrance and exit on this side. Please make sure your bags are tucked nicely under your chairs for fire safety and so forth. With that out of the way, please join me in welcoming Professor Marshall Gans and Dean Erica Chenoweth.
Thank you so much, Yort, and thanks to everybody who's joining us today. Before we get started, I'll say I am definitely not here as Dean Erica Chenoweth. I'm here as just somebody who's been working in an adjacent field, to say the least, to what Marshall is doing. And he and I are just so lucky, I think, that we get to be here having maybe the continuation of a conversation that we're often having together. And about halfway through the conversation, we always look at each other and say, "We should have this conversation in front of other people." Because, you know, every time Marshall and I sit down together, we realize that it's such a rich conversation and we should have either recorded it or done it in front of people, and now we're doing both at the same time. So, great job.
So we're very grateful to the Bloomberg Center, I think, also for giving us the chance to do that and for organizing such a lovely event here today. So, what we're going to do is talk a little bit about the book first and what motivated it, what you've learned since it came out and your conversations with a lot of people. We're going to talk a little bit about how you see it applying to city government and the insights of your book and your experience in this field. And then maybe we're going to talk a little bit more about where the country is at right now and some of the things that we're both reflecting on as we watch things unfold here.
So first, Marshall, your book, "People, Power, Change." Many folks in our audience, I'm sure, have read it. Maybe there are some who haven't yet had the pleasure. And so I was hoping, just to get us started, for those who aren't familiar with it, if you can just share what you see as the core message that emerges from the book. Maybe you can tell us a bit about what made you feel like you needed to write this book in the first place and what the core message is, and get us started that way.
Sure. Well, first, good afternoon. Let's try that one more time. But how about everybody in your own first language? Okay. So, good afternoon. Okay, it's better. That's the music of the future. That's really where we're headed. So, it's a real pleasure to have this opportunity with everyone online and Erica.
What motivated me to write this book? Well, I mean, I was fortunate to find a calling early in life. And I use the word calling intentionally. And it was in Mississippi in 1964 and '65 when I found that dealing with structural and systematic injustice started with the people themselves. It started with the people whom I admired enormously, who had found the courage to make their voices heard, to stand up, to risk their lives, and it was young people. And when I connected with them, it was something like — it wasn't deficit, it was asset. It was like I wanted to be like them.
And in Mississippi, what I learned was that I could work with people in such a way, even being an outsider, which I certainly was in Mississippi. Well, my mom was a teacher, and she called herself an educator because education comes from the Latin educ, which means to draw out, not to put in. It's not filling people's heads with stuff; it's drawing out of people their capability, their potential, what they can be, what we can be. And that's what I found myself doing in Mississippi, and I loved it.
And because it only started there, then it was how do they combine with each other? And then how does that turn into sources of power? And so that was organizing, and I really got hooked on it. And I'll just say one thing about power, because that's a word that's so commonly misunderstood. I think it's actually pretty intuitive. If you need what I've got more than I need what you've got, who's got the power? If you need what I've got more than I need what you've got, who's got the power? And if it's reversed, who does?
All right. So power, it's an influence created through interdependence. And that's something you have. It's an influence you can create. And the interdependence is needs and resources. And we live in an interdependent world. So there is almost always power dimensions to what's going on. Now, when it's more or less balanced, then we can create a lot more power with each other — for credit unions, co-ops. But when it's out of whack and much of the resources are over here and the need is over here, it'll almost inevitably turn into domination. In which case, we have to figure out how to rebalance it.
And so what it means is you start not with what you don't have, you start with what you do have. And the best example of that that I've learned from was the Montgomery bus boycott, where people boycotted the segregated buses in Montgomery. It took a year for them to win, but they did. And people looked at that situation, they say, "Gee, all the power's over here. Where are they getting any power?" Well, they boycotted for a year. Where do you think the power came from? Where do you think it came from? What do you see when you look down? Feet. Yeah. It turned out everybody had feet.
Now, if they used their feet to walk to work and deny the bus company the bus fare, instead of using their feet to get on the bus and give the bus company the bus fare, individual dependency could be turned into the bus company's dependency on an organized community. So it was that combination of people, of relationship, and collective effort, and how that could actually turn into power. And that's what really hooked me, and that's really what the book is. It's people, it's change, and it's power, and how do you put those things together, especially in times in which this whole way of looking at the world is under assault in so many ways — obvious ways.
Just all these ways that our belief in ourselves gets undermined. A kind of dehumanization of the systems all over the place. It's kind of like appreciating our value as human beings and the value of other human beings, and from that, how we build power. So that's kind of where I think the challenge is, right? In other words, I don't think it's just a political challenge. I think it's a cultural challenge. I think it's deeper, which, frankly, Trump's destructiveness creates opportunity if we look at it in the right way, because the old system was not working. I mean, the status quo was not working. That's why we're in the mess we're in.
And so it isn't like, let's go back. It's we have to go forward, and we have to find new ways to move forward to shape the world into which we want to live, and not a world that's imposed upon us. So it just seems like a very deep, core, pivotal moment and a real opportunity, a real important that we look at ourselves, we look at others, and we find where our common grounds are to build the power we need to shift things.
Yeah. So, "People, Power, Change." So you've now been on a multi-country tour. You've been to lots of cities. You've been to lots of places around really the world and in the United States talking about this book, meeting with people from all walks of life. I'm sure having lots of really good conversations about the ways people see your diagnosis as correct, and maybe even some places where people are starting to do the types of things that you would prescribe in your book. So I was wondering if you could reflect back to us a bit about what you might have learned from your book tour now that we're a year out from its initial release. And if you can talk about maybe a couple of stories that you've heard in your travels that reflect the type of approach to this that you think is very promising.
Okay. So it was mostly Western Europe and US, Mexico, Canada. I think that I was surprised at the hunger out there. The "we don't know what to do. We got to do something. We're trying to do something. How do we move forward?" And that was true in many places. Now in Western Europe, I found it a bit different, because there, where you have an electoral system that has members of parliament, but then it has actual political parties. I mean real parties where you become a member and you vote and you do stuff.
We have marketplaces. We don't have parties, and we have candidates competing for the brand. It's really a market exercise. It's not really a political exercise. So where you have a party organization, there's some balance between constituency organization and the electeds. We don't have that here. And so it puts an enormous burden on civil society to come up with the counterweight in order to make the thing work. Danny Schorr's book, "When Movements Anchor Parties," is a terrific historical look at the United States at the fact that change rarely originates from within the electoral. It's usually movements that generate enough energy, risk-taking, commitment in order to produce that kind of change.
But in Western Europe, I mean, everybody's like, you know, freaked out by the right and what's happening. And a lot of times it's really a lot about going back to basics. Are we building relationships with each other and our constituents, or have we turned them into data points or text messages? I mean, I had the privilege of, after the general election, you know, here they get together the campaign management from the presidential campaign. So I spent a day and a half in a room with the Trump people and the Harris people, which was kind of an interesting experience in and of itself.
But it was quite evident that the Harris campaign had been trying to tell people how they ought to feel rather than listening to how they felt. So this thing about knowing your people and seeing them as people, not data points, not proxies for people — that whole domain of abstraction, it really takes away our humanity. And so putting people back into the process in a real way — or not back into, that's a lot more challenging, but I think that's where we have to go, because if we don't, we keep becoming... we become text messages. We become data points. We become abstractions that then are referred to as, "Oh, we know what the people think because we did a poll."
Really? No. The people think from a poll? The one little question that's answered under no duress and under no consequence? It's not real. So I think everywhere it is a question of digging back into who are our people? How do we build relationships with each other? And I mean, relationships — so many of our interactions these days are transactions. They're not relationships. They're "I'll give you and you give me." And you know, building relationship is different.
And I mean, an example I often use: one of my students will invite another student to have coffee. We have a great conversation. "Hey, let's get together again next week." "I got exams next week. I got people coming from out of town next week. I'll send you an email." So sociologically speaking, just got dumped is what happened there. And see, what was missing was — what makes the relation — what was missing was there was no joint commitment. See, relationships come out of commitment, and it's taking the risk to commit to another person and to commit to an effort, because it's risk. Nobody can predict the future, so you don't know.
So commitment requires risk. Trust may grow out of that; it doesn't precede it. And so this kind of basic relational building work, people are hungry for it, and they miss it, and it's not there. Again, I think Europe's in better shape than we are, frankly. I think our institutions are not nearly as committed to democratic practice, and they certainly have much more in terms of a basic social commitment. I think we're at a real turning point in this country where lots of chickens have come home to roost, as they say.
But see, I think that optimism and pessimism are both arid because they claim to predict the future. "It's going to be all right." How do you know? "It's going to be terrible." How do you know? Hope is much more realistic. With hope, I'm guided by the insights of Maimonides, a 12th-century philosopher, who said that hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible as opposed to the necessity of the probable. It is always probable Goliath will win, but sometimes David does. It was improbable we elect a Black man president of this country in 2007, but it happened. Hope occupies the place between fantasy and certainty, at that domain of possibility. It could be.
And I think recognizing and embracing that, because sometimes we look for it — who's going to save us or what's the master plan — but most of us have had these experiences in our own lives if we look within. I mean, how many people here have ever had an experience of hurt? Let me say, if you were on the planet, you probably have. What about experiences of hope? What about that? See, if the hurt weren't there, you wouldn't think the world needed fixing. And if the hope wasn't there, you wouldn't be in this room talking with us right now. So sometimes we look out there for what's in here, and how we can give that to one another to create the creative capacity, the commitment to take advantage of this moment that we have to shape our future.
Yeah. You know, I think one of the things that is true about how people sometimes interpret events is that there's some big visible event and then something changes, and they attribute the change to that big visible event.
What you just said reminded me of something my mentor James Lawson used to talk about, which is what he called the one-on-one work. And it reminded me of what you just said about relationship building.
Concretely, what he would do — he was told when he got out of prison for being a conscientious objector for the Korean War. While he was in prison, he read Gandhi's autobiography, and that kind of helped him be motivated to join what he called the Movement for American Freedom, which is what they referred to the civil rights movement before it became renamed the civil rights movement. And Martin Luther King asked him to go to Nashville and desegregate it. And he was a young Methodist minister.
And he went, and he spent a year instead of doing what was being done everywhere else and trying to import the sort of tactics that were, you know, the bus boycotts and the other things. He thought, "I need to get to know people in this community and what their concerns are." So he described taking a full year, spending his time going into the community as a pastor basically and an organizer, and meeting with people in their homes during the day and just asking them about the things that were of concern to them. And because he was going during the day, it was often women who were at home, and they would share with him while their children were sleeping or otherwise.
"The biggest indignity for me is having to have my children wear ill-fitting clothes because when we go to the department stores, they won't let us try them on. And when we come home and they put them on and they're too big or too small, they won't let us return them. And we couldn't afford it anyway." And he heard that over and over and realized there was something in there that the community would be able to activate around if he could organize them. And that's why the way that Nashville started was with actually boycotting the downtown business district and doing consumer boycotts of the department stores, which was not something that was happening in other southern cities, but it's what that community wanted to do.
And he, you know, he did the trainings in the church basement and the nonviolence trainings and everything else. And you can see this depicted in the movie "The Butler." Actually, they show James Lawson — a sort of Jesse Williams character, I guess, as depicting him. And, you know, the ultimate outcome of this is that the town and the folks that he worked with and the students that came in did ultimately do the lunch counter sit-ins and everything else, which were kind of paired with these other tactics, and they built this huge constituency that basically desegregated downtown Nashville within a year, officially.
And they did it in a way that also negotiated and communicated with the press, with the actual business owners, that there wouldn't be like a public announcement, it would just happen, because they didn't want to have their stores bombed by white supremacists and things like that. So they dealt with it in a way that worked and made it a sustainable outcome. And it started with the one-on-one work. And that was the thing. He was also always so careful to make sure people knew that you can't just go in and say, "They're doing this tactic in this town, we're going to do it here and get the same outcome." And to me, you know, concretely, that feels very much like what you're saying in terms of an organizing kind of practice.
Very much, Erica. And I actually slept on the floor of Jim Lawson's church in Memphis. Yes. When we were preparing to go to Mississippi, and we were partway down, we were in Memphis, and then we would go to Mississippi the next day. But it was Jim Lawson's church floor where I first connected with him.
What a legend. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, let's talk a little bit about this. Like, we have a recent example in the United States right now of somebody who definitely used these organizing methods that you've been talking about — shall we call them practices, organizing practices, right? — and who has won a mayoral election of, you know, the largest city in the United States, and has done so kind of explicitly by using these methods.
And I know it's been publicly reported in the August Harvard Crimson that you have been involved to some degree in sharing what you know with that campaign and in your kind of private work. So, you know, what happens when you go from organizer to someone who has to govern a city? What are the things that are in common about those roles, and what are the things that are going to be challenging about those roles?
Just about everything is going to be challenging.
Clearly, that's true. But what's in common about it? Like, what will transfer? Well, shall we say...
I think that, well, first of all, the way they went about that campaign. Tasha Vanter deserves a lot of credit. She was the organizing director for the campaign, but she learned her approach in the Obama campaign 2007 and '08. And sometimes you got to wait a while for the return to come back. But it's still — when you invest in people, it's a good investment because it's a long-term kind of return. When you build a campaign like that, they have this enormous volunteer base. The numbers have been 100,000, 110,000, whatever. Not unlike what we did with Obama in 2008.
Then the question is, what do you do with that? And in the Obama campaign, they decided to put it away. They decided not to engage it.
Can you say more about what that actually means, like to put it away? I mean, it's... what does demobilization look like? How do you decide to do that, and what does it actually do?
Well, and it's — well, what it actually does, you have all these volunteer groups, teams all over the country. "We want to — we're ready, we're ready." And then the word comes, "No, don't. We're in charge. We know what we're doing. We're going to take this organization, put it inside the Democratic National Committee, and we're totally uninterested in the Democratic National Committee, and so we're going to try to hold it here," kind of maybe. But there were so many calls and emails from people all over the country saying, "What's next? What's next? What do we do now?" And it wasn't responded to.
So unfortunately, see, to me that was a critical moment that was missed. And so here we have another moment at a city level that is similar in the sense that there's real people out there who are organized. So the question is, what do you do about that? Now, some people are going to come into government. Certainly, you know, you're the mayor, you want to have people that are aligned with you and so forth, that's going to happen, but not everybody. And we know the DSA organization was involved in the campaign, but it's not capable of absorbing what — so you have to confront, what do we do?
That's what they're working on right now. They've set up a 501c4, they call it "Our Time," and they're trying to figure out how is it that we build this organization that was in relationship with the mayor but not dependent upon the mayor, so that there can be some kind of balance. It's as if you had a constituency party in relationship to an elected official, you would have balance. And so that's what they're trying to do. And it's hard. And it's really important because what happens otherwise is the counterweight to who's in office is all from organized interests of different kinds, and there's no popular organization. There's no mechanism.
Now, in the old days with machines, right? You get in, you'd organize a machine, and that was how you got reelected. Well, that, you know, is a bit out of fashion, shall we say, although it persists in different places. So to me, the question: how does an elected official maintain a relationship with an organized constituency that actually represents a community, right? You know, in a real way. It's a real question in our politics at every level.
Well, and I think that the thing that's also tricky about it is the fact that, you know, the people who are represented in that constituency have, you know, conceivably just put their heart and soul into trying to get the guy in, and they're big fans, right? And that was their job, is to be the biggest fans of all time and get other people to be huge fans. And now they have to go into a posture where there may be some antagonism with regard to the person that they, you know, tried to elevate. And so how do you manage within the organization the fact that it's now going to be kind of the outside game pushing the inside game?
Well, it's not unlike what happens where you have parliamentary democracies and organized parties. I mean, because there is tension, and it can be destructive, but it also can be a very important, healthy tension. Now the question is how to come up with something like that here. I think when people are so highly motivated, they engage as they have, and they win, that's a big deal. But how can I say — if they're organized, they're also... well, my favorite Jesus quote, okay, is from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, chapter 10, verse 16, where Jesus is about to send his organizers — well, his apostles — out to tell a new story. It's a new story. You know, it's a gospel.
And he says, "If I'm to set you as sheep among wolves, you must be innocent as doves and wise as serpents." In other words, it's not an idealist. It's not a pragmatist. It's both. And that's the challenge. And that's the challenge because too often it's said, "Oh, you're idealists, let's all be that. Oh, we're pragmatic." No, the tension between the two is where the action is. And then how you create that within organizations and make it part of the organizational culture and so forth.
You know, it's not easy. It's hard. Chris Robichaud and I, my colleague here, we do a new class here called "Being Human," and one of the interesting things in final papers was I just learned that there are questions that have no answers. How about that? You know, how about that? So it's holding tension. Boy, is that important, because the anxiety we have about uncertainty drives us to false absolutes. "Oh, it's all this. Oh, it's all that." Well, in life, almost nothing is all this or all that.
It's more where the engagement is. But developing the heart muscles, the head muscles to be able to hold that kind of tension and translate it into creative effort is not easy.
Yeah. Well, there's an interesting reverse relationship here too, with the official who needs to build a constituency in order to push something through against all of the powerful interests. And there are all these apocryphal stories about who first used this formulation. But one of the apocryphal stories is that, you know, FDR was encountering the civil rights, um, Black leadership, um, and saying, "I agree with you on basically everything you're saying with regard to a new social program. Make me do it." Right?
And then Obama sometimes would refer back to that when he was dealing with different activist constituencies. He'd say, "Okay, I totally agree with you on gun control, or I totally agree with you on, you know, on healthcare. Make me do it." And the idea was like, you know, build me a movement that convinces all of the other elected representatives and builds me power where I am in my situation to argue that this is the only way forward.
Yeah. Now, but that also threatens to somewhat instrumentalize a constituency for particular...
I think, yeah, and I think it depends on what the commitment is, what the understanding is. That's where if we actually had functional party organizations, it would be so beneficial, because that's how they would work, but, you know, and there'd be tension and so forth, but there's a distinct entity over here that isn't just the machine. And I think we need that. We need accountability in our politics in so many different ways.
Now, a mayor is in a position where he can certainly support, or he or she can support developing an organized constituency. That would be great. That'd be good. But it's only going to be real if there's tension. In other words, if it's recognized that this is what this is.
You know, in California, when we needed the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, when I was working with the farm workers, we had exactly this relationship with Jerry Brown, who was then governor, and it was very much out here and then in there, and so then combined we were able to make a real major breakthrough.
Yeah. How explicit was that, by the way? So in that context, for example, do you sit down — does somebody sit down with Jerry Brown and say, "Look, we're playing an inside-outside game here. We all agree. Let's like just — you, when we say this out there, you'll understand. When you say this over here, we'll understand." Like, is it explicit, or is it just like you just go for it and hope for the best?
Well, Erica, it's a combination. And a lot of the most explicit is not, shall we say, in the record.
Well, I have no doubt that's true. That's why I'm asking you.
No, I mean, I think — well, Jerry's, I mean, still with us. Very interesting guy. And certainly had a pretty deep commitment to what we were trying to do, but also I think he and us were realistic about what was needed. And so, yeah, it was like — yeah, it's like, "We're gonna come and have a sit-in, blah, blah, blah." And there was an understanding. And I think that's often the case in policy, where there's understandings that are private, not public, but sometimes they go against the interest of the public way too often.
Right. Exactly. Right. So, can we talk just briefly about something you just alluded to, which is that maybe a mayor wants to build a constituency? So, there's a lot of people who are holding office right now who would love to have the type of enthusiasm and popular support and organizing network that Mamdani is going to inherit as he steps into this role. If they don't have one, how do they get one? Is there a way for people in that position to recognize and acknowledge the agency that their constituents need to feel right now in this moment, and to basically support the building of community organizations, community organizing from that perch? Right? So like, this is the reverse issue again.
How do you get your community to be organized in the way that, okay, we're talking about?
Well, the starting point is they got elected somehow, right? So, there's already people out there, and presumably they got elected by a majority or whatever. So, there's already people out there, and they're hoping for different things. So, one question is how to engage with those people — you know, "do what I say" or grow in relationship.
Now, Pete Buttigieg in — in — in — Ben. Yeah, in — South Bend. South Bend. Yeah, thank you. No, he was in our first cohort of mayors that we trained in public narrative. And so he invited our team to go to South Bend, and we had these sessions with community leaders in organizing and in public narrative and so forth. And our team has done that in a few other places — Albuquerque, in — what is it? — Wolf Trap, I think. No, it's interesting, but it takes courage by an officeholder to say, "Hey, get organized so we can be in dialogue," rather than "get organized so I can satisfy all these interests over here by telling you what to do." It's real leadership.
I mean, the definition we use for leadership in our work is that it's about accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty. So it is not about the exercise of authority. It is about the exercise of leadership, which are not the same thing. And when you have authority as a resource for you, it's a tremendous resource. How do you use it? Do you use it to disempower? Do you use it to empower? And it takes a lot of courage to do the empower thing, I think.
Yeah, no doubt about it. So, we're going to go to audience Q&A in about five minutes. We'll use a method where we look at some of the online ones, and we'll ask folks to come to the mic. So, be thinking of your question. I'm going to throw out a big question for us to chew on, which I mentioned to you before, which is: can we talk about differences and similarities in organizing in a democratic context — like an established democratic context — versus a backsliding context and/or an authoritarian context? You and I have both — like, we have both interacted with people from all over the world and people in the United States doing organizing and mobilizing in these different contexts, and, you know, they're different. So what do you notice as the most important similarities and differences?
Well, we've had the opportunity to work with people in the Middle East, in Egypt, in China, and we're, you know — yeah, it's tough.
Yeah. And what usually what has happened in my experience is that, first of all, there are red lines and usually people know what the red lines are. In other words, they're going to know better than I know. And then the question is, what can you do? Well, I remember a rural literacy program in China that was organizing a professional development program in Egyptian universities. That was organizing. Was he called that?
Can I just say, when he says red lines, he doesn't mean like red lines on the backsliding. He means things that you're allowed to say and not allowed to say in the country. Right. Yeah. Just to be clear.
