What can creative storytellers learn from Marshall Ganz?
- Written byRuth Taylor
- Published date 17 February 2026
Editor's note: This event took place in May 2025. We’re publishing this reflection now as part of consolidating our Stories archive and documenting key moments in the Institute’s recent work.
“Be present to one another and see each other’s humanity.”
What can creative storytellers learn from organising leader, Marshall Ganz?
In this guest blog, writer and facilitator Ruth Taylor reflects on the conversation with Marshall Ganz and shares her own takeaways from the evening.
On 16 May 2025, a group of folks from across the broad social and environmental justice field gathered in Central London to hear from legendary organiser, Marshall Ganz. Hosted by Act Build Change and the AKO Storytelling Institute, the event, titled, "What Narratives Are Needed in These Turbulent Times?", was co-produced with Kairos, an event space for the discussion of radical ideas.
If you’re new to his work, Marshall Ganz, currently a lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School, teaches and writes on organising, which he defines as the practice of enabling people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the changes they want in the world.
Influenced by his experiences organising with the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) during the Civil Rights Movement and United Farm Workers, Ganz later became instrumental in the design of the grassroots organising which underpinned the 2008 Obama for President campaign.
Ganz developed the Public Narrative framework, a beloved methodology of organisers the world over, which consists of 3 components:
- a 'Story of Self'
- a 'Story of Us'
- a 'Story of Now'.
Marshall Ganz has given a talk on 'The Story of Self, Now and Us'.
A Story of Self communicates the values that you hold that have brought you to this work; a Story of Us communicates the values shared by a group of people acting together; and a Story of Now communicates a challenge to those values which demands action now.
As a framework, it is used by organisers to build trust and solidarity between a group of people, to help them go the distance in organising for justice.
If you’re curious, take a look at Barack Obama's keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention using the public narrative framework to see why it’s so powerful.
Hope as a verb
The evening kicked off by folks in the room reflecting on the moment we find ourselves in in the UK, with a far-right movement that continues to grow and strengthen and feelings of insecurity (both justified and engineered) felt by people across the country. People spoke of a growing feeling of disconnection taking root and asked how we could practically deploy different narratives to build power for a different type of future, for all people and our shared planet.
Ganz began by quoting American activist, Tom Hayden, “Change is slow, except when it’s fast”, and acknowledged that we are, indeed, in times that feel very charged, with things happening very quickly and not always in the direction that we would like them.
After giving space for the recognition that stuff is tough right now and we’re facing an uncertain future, Ganz offered some powerful words of wisdom: “hope is the belief in the plausibility of the possible”.
In many progressive spaces today, hope is a word you’ll hear mentioned a lot, but not necessarily unpacked. It always strikes me as having a similar vibe to the "laugh or else you’ll cry" idiom; have hope or else crawl into a ball and entirely give up. But as many people have said, having hope can feel really bloody difficult - especially right now!
To Ganz hope isn’t as arrogant as pessimism or optimism, that claim to know. Instead, it acknowledges what is bad and sets to work to find a pathway through to the other side.
A key job of folks today who are in positions to communicate directly to the public, like writers, artists, producers, designers etc, is to build this sense of hope in possibility. Not to promise to "know’" what the future holds, but to equip people with a sense that they can act and that their actions matter, even in the face of uncertainty and fear. To Ganz, we cannot expect to shock or scare people into action - this can only be done through the “emotion of agency”: hope.
Being curious
Ganz remarked that when we truly love people, we are genuinely curious about them. We recognise and appreciate them as the complex, multifaceted, three dimensional, technicolour human beings that they are.
In the practice of engaging "our audiences" in causes we care about today, we often reduce people to what they think (or what we think they think) about one particular issue. We attempt to categorise them, and then to communicate to them with the magic words we believe are going to unlock their support or engagement. This type of strategy often attempts to tell somehow how they ought to feel, how they ought to act, but it fails to listen.
In organising practice this is where coaching comes in. Coaching in organising is done to help people reflect on their experiences, clarify their values and think about how their views may have been shaped. Organisers trained in coaching learn to listen deeply to those they are in community with - including those that they do not feel politically or ideologically aligned with.
During the evening, attendees got to witness this approach in practice, when Ganz spoke to individuals in the audience about their calling and why it matters as a guiding force in their lives.
Instead of trying to push an opinion directly onto someone, Ganz was led by his curiosity, asking questions which allowed the person to reflect on their own lives and how they’ve got to where they are. These conversations lead to a tangible shift in the vibe of the event, from a group of people attending a talk in some kind of professional capacity, to being a gathering of human beings with rich experiences, histories and hopes for the future to share with one another.
As creatives, we are used to building layered, emotionally rich characters in the stories we tell - but when it comes to our audiences, we don’t always afford them the same depth. Particularly when someone holds different values from our own, we may flatten or stereotype them. Yet if we’re serious about shifting perceptions or sparking reflection, we need to start by genuinely listening. That means approaching our audiences not as minds to win over, but as full human to be curious about and to listen to.
Centering values in our work
Ganz suggested that as people seeking to respond to social and environmental challenges, we need to shift from focusing on the question "what is my issue?" to centre the question "who are my people?".
As social justice creatives, it is normal practice to create work which is about helping to ‘solve’ particular issues. For example, work in service of climate justice or gender equality. This "issuefication" is found across much of civil society and the culture space. Ganz suggested that to transcend this we should instead align ourselves around the core values which underpin the human drive to care about many different instances of injustice.
With this shift away from broadcasting messages, we begin to tell stories as a means of communicating our own sacred values and speaking the language of emotion: in Ganz words “speaking to the heart as well as the head”. This, of course, is a key outcome of storytelling practice.
Through the public narrative framework, the emphasis is on speaking about what deeply moves us and inviting others to reflect on the same. From this place of connection, vulnerability and ultimately, trust, we not only build the foundations for stronger change making, but we perform in the micro with our audiences what we hope to see playing out in the macro in our national politics.
A great place for creatives to start exploring the public narrative framework is to consider their own "Story of Self" - what matters most to you in this world? What led you to do the work you now do? What struggles have you faced that have informed your choices? Who has most influenced how you show up in the world?
From a place of greater self-reflection, perhaps we’re more able to create work that connects with a variety of people at the deeply human level.
Getting out the door
There are no clear answers to questions like "how do you prevent climate collapse?”, or “how do you solve systemic racism?” and so we can flip-flop around, changing our mind on our course of action. But Ganz reminded us that understanding doesn’t proceed action, it grows out of it. No matter how much research we do, how many focus groups we run, we cannot predict or control the future. The best way to learn is to take risks, make mistakes and try again - hopefully a little wiser than before. The hard truth of the matter is that we cannot do this work without getting out into the world and speaking to people directly - even people that we feel are very different from us. True connection requires time being spent with people, having conversations and listening to their stories. The call to action was simple: be brave and get out of the door. That is where true inspiration lies.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ganz is a gifted communicator; able to present you with the theory of his ideas, brought to life through stories and conversations from his time doing this work across the world. The evening went by far too quickly, as is the way with these things, and folks left with a list of new conversations to have and questions to ponder.
Before wrapping up and wishing us well, Ganz reflected on the importance of this work, especially when things feel tough: “[the ideas shared tonight] are the most useful in hard times… they are a way to be present to one another and to see each other’s humanity”. When all around us feels fraught with peril and we look ahead to the months and years to come with a creeping dread, this is the exact moment to come together, to speak authentically to our values and to be present to one another’s struggles, building new revenues of courage and belief in possibility.