People, Power, Change: In Conversation with Professor Marshall Ganz

um I'm Alexandra RAR I'm a faculty member here at the monk School of global Affairs and public policy and I'm the director of undergraduate programs and experience and that last bit is the

reason why I have the real pleasure of being with you this morning uh before I introduce our guests um I want to begin by talking a little bit about where

we're gathered today so many of you know that UV te uh sits on dish with one spoon territory and you also probably know that this land has long been

occupied by many IND many different indigenous peoples including members of the hinan and the inab confederacies so we're here in the Great

Lakes region um and the many distinct indigenous communities that make up these two confederacies came to an agreement about how they would live on this land right so we're talking

confederacies that are themselves made up of many different communities of many different kinds of people but they came together across these confederacies

across these communities in order to collectively commit to sharing this ecosystem and those agreements that they made the dish with one spoon was based

on this really compelling and elegant concept of one dish one spoon this is I think a theory a metaphor a conviction it's a way of

thinking a way of thinking about how many many individual Sovereign people can collectively share for a single shared space collectively care for a

single shared space I am always struck by this image of how do we eat from a single dish with a single spoon so that the dish is not

consumed by only a few but instead it's shared and it's never completely emptied the treaty was a collective and

voluntary commitment it was made between diverse people and it was explicitly committed to living justly in a shared place without misusing or draining the

resources of that place so I wanted to highlight this because this morning as we spend some time with Professor Gans um I think his

work resonates with this commitment to sustainability and not just a narrowly defined environmental sustainability but a sustainability to

making a world in which there is enough enough for everyone while still respecting individual autonomy right without

compulsion and also to seeing a kind of collective commitment as a just and creative Road forward so having said that it is my

pleasure to introduce Our Guest Marshall Gans has spent his life dedicated to the craft of organizing people to enact the change they want to see in the world so here are just a few of his experiences

in that Network advocating for civil rights with Bob Moses and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 16 years organizing with Caesar Chavez and the United Farm

Workers developing the Grassroots strategy for President Obama's 2008 election campaign and training Future Leaders over 20 years at Harvard's Kennedy

School in this moment as you all know as democracy really Teeters on a precarious Edge in this upcoming election less than two weeks as the political economic and

technological forces we are all familiar with have weakened so much of our capacity for Collective action Professor Gans has distilled half a Century's

worth of insights into an urgent call for strengthening democracy in his most recent book people power and change organizing for Democratic

renewal this book is written in the tradition of classic Classics like solinsky's 1972 Rules for Radicals which is a fabulous book uh gans's transformational book is both a

practical guide on how to reclaim Democratic power and it's also an inspiring Manifesto that sees Collective organizing as an essential driver of democracy and we're going to be talking

about that connection today so whether it's a political campaign a community organization Trade union social movement ad advocacy group

or a workplace Gans argues that lasting and meaningful change can only happen if people come together for a shared purpose if they deliberate together and

act together this book uses real world examples it uses political Theory it uses illustrative diagrams and in doing so it breaks down

the organizing craft into six chapters that describe the essential components of that craft so there's relationship building storytelling strategizing

acting structuring and developing leadership and he is here today to talk with us I hope about all of this and more so please join me in welcoming

Marshall G come and sit over here and just so you know this is how we're gonna structure our time together um Professor Gans and I are going to have a conversation I'm going to ask a few questions and we're

going to open it up because we really want to hear from you we want to know what your questions are what you're thinking about this set of ideas thanks for coming thanks for having me and good

morning I couldn't hear anything good morning good morning okay it's supposed to go both ways you know so that's what we're going to be doing

in our conversation so not a monologue is what you're saying not a monologue yeah okay so my my first question for

you is in this new book you describe democracy as a practice which I think is such a fascinating way of putting it you say it's something that has to be made

has to be made again and again it's not achieved and permanent um I guess we can think of it as a verb in some ways not a noun yes and I think that is so helpful

as thinking about when we think about democracy as something that we can lose something we can slip out of that isn't guaranteed as many other people have before

us and you say that learning and creating a culture of learning is essential for democracy to thrive that really caught my eye because we're here at a

university so I wonder if you can start by talking to us a little bit about what does a rich and an accessible culture of learning look like and how can we start

to build one well step one step no yeah exactly going go can it be enumerated yeah I don't think so um I mean first I just want to say it's it's a real

pleasure to be here in Toronto and to be uh in this conversation I actually uh lived in Toronto from 1968 to 70 and 73

to 75 I was working for the farmer Union in California and we were boycotting California grapes and it turned out that Toronto was the third largest market of grapes believe it or not and so I was

sent here to uh can you know persuade people to organize people to stop eating California grapes and Toronto was one of the most effective cities and shutting down

supermarkets and all that to California grapes and for me it was a wonderful opportunity to learn how things work uh in in Labor uh in the NDP and political

and it was so distinct from my experience in the US that it actually gave me a lot of Hope because I could see an alternative way in which this

stuff at work so 1980 I almost moved up here when Reagan well yeah rean was elected so anyway it's great to be here and uh we had an office not far from

here around blur and Spadina very CL on Madison Street yeah oh wow yeah anyway welcome back good yeah it's good to be back okay learning my my mom was a

teacher and she called herself an educator because um the word for Education comes from the Latin educar which means to draw out not

to put in and so it's thinking of Education the process of Education as enabling people to acquire their capacities their agency their their

potential it's looking at people not in terms of deficit but in terms of possibility and so it's a very developmental way of of engaging with people that is a Common Thread in

organizing when it's done well it's foundational because it's people at the center that's why the thing's called people power and change it's not issues power and change it's people power and change

because that's sort of where the core of the whole thing is is in our our capacity our worth our value as individuals in relationship with others

so not this isolated individual floating up somewhere which is a fiction doesn't exist we're all in relationship and so

it's it's understanding kind of how that works in terms of of specifically creating a learning environment one of the first things we do uh well we're

creating what we call a brave space not a safe space because there's no learning through com know words discomfort is a sign there's something to learn uh and

it's it's a different way of of thinking about it um and so one of the key elements in that is the practice of coaching now I don't know you ever been

coached you ever coached anybody yeah it's interesting what makes for good or bad coaching the way we teach this is a person has a leadership challenge because this is all in the context of a

way of understanding leadership and organizing and so they pair with another person another student who uh is there to help them now as a coach but the rule

is no advice you cannot give advice all you can do is ask questions that's it and so at first there'll be some silence and then people will begin to learn what

happens when you learn to ask questions good questions and what it means is then you you're creating an interdependent learning space where yeah everybody's got challenges nobody's perfect that's

the whole point that's why you're there to learn and at the same time you can be of great value to another person by having none of the answers but by knowing what the questions are to ask so

that you can enable that person to find answers so it turns out that little exercise it it means that people are present to each other not as judges but as teachers

in other words we're here to teach each other to learn with each other we're not here to judge each other and like who's great and who's who's not so that's part

of it um we set ground rules uh you know how we're going to engage with each other fundamental one of which is respect but it's respect not as an abstract concept it's uh understanding

how it feels uh to be respected in dis respected and so forth so it's well grounded in the fact that we learn with our heads but we learn with our hearts

we learns with our hands and that learning is not this sort of purely conceptual game but it is actually about learning how to be in the world and how

to engage with other people and we were talking a bit before the confusion that's often in in the academy um I was at a dinner with this guy Tim vernham

who invented the worldwide web and he was saying that machines can make decisions but only humans can make

choices what he meant was that that AI is and and that it it's a an exercise in logic based on past information and so

you're so logical it's uh called Reckoning based on what we know and so forth but judgment is something we can do because it's based on emotional

learning it's based on our physical engagement with the world it's based also on our conceptual understanding so it's a Head Hands heart kind of way of looking at things and when you open up

learning to that form of communic experience turns out to be fundamental in understanding how the world works and that we can get trapped

in these abstract Frameworks that exist up in the sky somewhere but they're not the real world and we get into big trouble when we confuse them with the

real world there's a school of thought called alignment thinking that argues that all models are wrong all models are wrong because a model is an abstraction

of complex reality and it's a hypothesis that this could affect this could affect this and so it's useful in that sense as a hypothesis but we get in trouble when

we begin to think that is the real world those models and those formulas and not simply a lens on the real world so it's

a really fundamental it so that I think it undermines or underlines the significance of appreciating our own experience and learning from our experience and learning from the

experience of others and learning with others in shared experience as sort of foundational so our pedagogy is experiential uh we we talk about it's

kind of like how you learn to ride a bike people learn how to ride a bike anybody studied bicyc ly right what what you have to do what' you have to

do you got get on the bike what's the first thing that happened see that's your moment of truth that's when you went home went to bed or you found the courage to get back up knowing you're going to keep falling for

a while because it's the only way you can learn to keep your balance and in my experience that's how we'd learn any practice that's how we learned to do any

practice and so then it so the way we teaches here's uh here's an explanation here's a model now you get

on the bike you practice and then we debrief what it is so what we teach is the practices of organizing in public narrative not the theories thereof

that's an element in it but the real learning is in the practice and so coming back to reasonable point about practices it's number one it's because

models are so problematic um we get into this false reality um and so well it also goes the idea that

democracy is not something you have it's something you do you know we live in a world of change uh you know the one constant is change and

unpredictability and so the engagement in in doing in practicing is what creates the realities within which we're operating so I sort of have a little

side camp campaign against nouns I I think they're false representations of reality because really everything's a r uh everything is changed everything's Dynamic and so if

we're not Learners in the context of what we do we're really missing the boat uh Eisenhower I'm quoting General Eisenhower after the D-Day invasion

somebody said General Eisenhower planning must really really be important he said yeah planning is important but plans are useless his point being that

once you hit the world that's when the learning really has to begin because now it's real and you have the disappointments the the surprises the

opp that's where the real work that's why I think of strategy as strategizing it's a verb it's not like oh we have a plan now let's go implement it and the world will totally conform except that

never happens I mean and you know you can have a plan for the next 25 years of your life and good luck uh it's a fantasy because we can't predict the future what

we can is prepare ourselves to engage in the future in a way that is based on learning and adaptation and growth so that's why I call them

practices ways of doing things and there are five basic practices uh relationship building storytelling strategizing action and structuring and the point

about those are is that they don't require a degree in nuclear physics because as humans we do all of that we all form relationships not necessarily good ones all the time but we form

relationships we tell stories uh we strategize anytime you've overslept have to figure out how to get to school on time uh when when the bus wasn't working but you're strategizing you're sort of

saying how do I turn what I have into what I need to get what I want that's what strategy is uh we all uh understand the difference between someone showing

up and not show that that's action uh and we also all we structure ourselves and that word can be really scary uh oppressive structure again that word

comes from the Greek and it means to build and the implication is that if we don't create structure we're not building anything for the future because all it is is commitments we make to each

other about how we're going to work together that's what it is how are we going to make decisions how are we going to hold ourselves accountable when are we going to meet what's and and so many

groups fall apart resisting that kind of commitment to Collective process and without a commitment to a shared shared ways of doing things that's what we're fighting about all the time and we not

don't have energy for what we're actually trying to do and structuring will happen anyway without intentionality there's a classic piece called The Tyranny of

structurelessness by Joe Freeman a feminist sociologist in the early early 70s and she argues when people get together they are going to form structures of some kind but they're

often off the books they're not visible and then something happens we say well who decided that who was I hope some say this familiar this was just my experience in Dysfunctional groups uh

because it's unclear so clarity about what our commitments are to work together it's really important so and at the heart of all that as you said is the

development of leadership but leadership not as a position but also as a practice um you know there's people who occupy positions of formal leadership

turn out to be pretty awful leaders I have a few examples I can share uh on the other hand we meet people who are exercising leadership in the way we

think of it uh without the titles and all of that because the definition we use is that leadership is about accepting responsibility for enabling

others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty the point being that when everything's working what do you need leadership for everything's working it's when there are the challenges the

uncertainties the questions that's where the creative initiative taking imaginative role of leadership is and so it is a you know we think of it as a you

ask your do I have the skills for these new challenges a hands challenge uh you know can I use my resources in new ways that's a strategic challenge uh and then where do I get the courage where do I

get the Hope how do I Inspire The Hope and courage in others that is often required to confront real to take the risks involved in dealing with real change that's a challenge to the heart

so the whole thing is a head handser kind of approach uh to learning and to leadership and to Collective action because in organizing the first question

is not what is my issue but who are my people who are the people with whom I'm engaging in this work together uh and what is the change they need they want not because I did a study and think they

do because I listen to a whole lot of people and based on the lived experience the pain points The Hope points what's real and then finally how do I work with them to enable them to turn their

resources into the power they need in order to achieve that change so it's not providing Services which is fine it's not marketing products it's building

what we call a constituency which also comes from the Latin conar which means to stand together and the idea being to bring people together to stand together learn learn together work together

decide together and hopefully win together so that's kind of you know the summary of a semester long class but but again I think the thing

about it is this is all accessible to us as humans and and it's really important to appreciate that I like what you just said at the

end there I think that one of the things that um we often talk about in our classes um is the sense that many people have at this moment that the world is

overwhelming right like where do you start how do you act and I like what you just said about how this is learnable right and you doesn't require an elite

form of expertise that is only available to a very few um and I really loved what you just said about the first question in organizing

isn't what's my issue so it's not who do we want to elect to be May or how do we protect this endangered species it's who are my people that's a very very

different approach that gives you a really fundamentally different Baseline than saying okay how do I elect this person or how do I get this ballot

measure stopped why is that so different what does it do when you focus who are my people the core question is values okay not issues

in other words what is it we value values are feelings they're not abstract ideas I mean St Augustine said it's one thing to know the good another to love it loving it is what enables

action knowledge does not equal action in the absence of motivation and values are motivational I mean we map the world cognitively which is very helpful for finding our way from

here to there how question but that answer the why question as we grow we attach value to objects to experiences to other people this is good for me this

is bad for me this lifts me up this causes me Des spare it's a whole language of emotion and often when I say the language of emotion people say oh my God you got to be totally rational you

know we don't have any space for emotion well then you have a sociopaths what you have because because human beings we make sense as I say emotionally we make

sense of the world uh physically we make sense of the world world conceptually and and so it's

well I lost my thread my mother would say it must have been a lie I was thinking must no well I'm gonna find that troubling when it happens to me no I

think my the point I'm trying to make is that speaking the language of emotion is fundamental in other words if you're going to take value seriously you're going to to have a conversation in the

language of emotion because that's that's that's what they are and you know that may sound bizarre but uh music speaks the language of emotion doesn't it I mean you know you don't know the

words but you're you're engaged it's making sense it's communicating with you worship speaks the language of emotion theater poetry drama they all speak the language of emotion they're all about

how we feel about things and how we feel life and its experiences so that's kind of So when you say who are my people the first question is I

listen to a lot of people and try to learn where's the values Foundation here because when you can establish a values Foundation which is not an intellectual exercise and that's the power of stories

because stories can communicate the emotional content of facing a facing A disruption and how to respond to that disruption stories address the

fundamental question of human agency and how to develop the emotional capacity to confront disruptions in such

a way that we can respond to them mindfully as opposed to react to them fearfully we're hardwired for fearful reaction to the unexpected and there's

good evolutionary reasons for that but once we start to live with people in other in in cult broader cultures we had to find cultural ways to manage our fears and to manage our our our

reactions and we came up with culture and we came up with hope uh as a way in which to counter fear we came up with solidarity or love relationship to

counter isolation uh with a sense of self-worth to counter the self-doubt that often goes with a fear reaction so the essential learning out of out of a

story is what we call the narrative moment and a moment a narrative moment is a particular kind of moment um I can I was up with my partner at the beach we

were watching the sunset was really beautiful was orange pink St that's Moment One Moment two I was at the beach with my partner we were watching the sunset it was really beautiful it

started to rain I started to go but then uh uh my partner she grabbed my arm she said wait a second it's only rain as long as we're together we're good see something happened in the second moment

nothing happened in the first moment and what makes it a narrative moment is the confrontation with disruption how we find the resources where are the values

foundations how do we find the emotional resources to go toward response and not reaction so we can make and then the outcome and because we can identify

empathetically with the protagonist of a story we're able to feel the experience not just observe it and comment on it and that's the power for emotional

communication around how we deal with adversity how we deal with the unexpected and it's a fundamental issue in human life because you know uh it

sort of the story doesn't get interesting until the disruption happens it's boring and then and then something happens whoa and you have to ask why are we so curious about that why you spend

billions of dollars on this every year it's the same thing and you have to ask yourself then how many times a day do you have to deal with the unexpected that for which you're not prepared that

which you nevertheless have to deal with and we seem infinitely curious to learn how to do that not as a theoretical Prospect as a theoretical project but as

much more of an emotional project how do we how do we enable ourselves to be choiceful and not reactive and counter the fear with other elements and that's

what narrative teaches and and so you have a narrative moment but then it's Ned within a broader narrative moment and a broader but unless there's some

disruption some kind of response required and some kind of outcome I mean where didd you hear your first stories where'd you hear

them yeah yeah caregivers usually yeah why were they telling you all the stories to teach I mean also maybe to keep you busy that's also another

another pie but yeah to teach okay so teach all right great here's a list of things to do and don't do these things do do these things done does that work

it's all up here see the story teaches here because you take away then an experience a lived experience that can be of value to you when you're confronting the unexpected and the

challenges that you're facing and this is why Faith Traditions cultural Traditions uh families all teach some stories and and and so public narrative

what we teach is a way of harnessing storytelling to the work of leadership and organizing by enabling people to learn how to how

to enable others to get them not your titles not all that but what experiences have you had that really why do you care why do you care why do you care for what you care about

sometimes those are hurtful experiences they're often early in life but then where'd you get your hope where'd you get your sense of worth those are often

also I mean how many folks here have had had an experience at hurt how about an experience of Hope see if you hadn't hadn't had the hurt you wouldn't think the world needed

fixing if you hadn't had the hope you wouldn't think you could and so the fact that you're in this room means you have hope resources within you and and so it

it's how to harness how to mobilize that how to access that to deal with all these threats and challenges disruptions

and uncertainties that we have so that's that's to make values real and that's why people come first uh people come first in the states I know one of the

big problems we have is is issue mobilizing and it's kind of like I I I like fish I like trees well we can't work together because we're fish people

or we're tree people and we're competing with the same daughter for funding and so you know come on we both have reverence for the natural world like that's what we Val value so let's

combine around what we value and then we can make strategic choices about focusing on fish or trees or whatever in the context in which that's a good

strategic Choice that's a very different process than allowing your identity to be defined by an issue you know allowing

ourselves to be defined by any labor is dehumanizing I mean you know we each have unique identities that we develop through our life experience we have

values we make choices to reduce that to a label I mean come on really one label it's a real problem because it

dehumanizes the user and it dehumanizes the other turns us into abstractions and abstractions are not reality human beings are complex they have diverse experiences and so if we want to get

serious really about understanding each other we got to get to that place which is the value's place and that then opens up all sorts of ways to appreciate

difference as fundamentally richness uh sources of learning uh in my online organizing class right now we have an online class in public narrative

and we have about 130 students from about 37 countries and uh it is really great to see how people when they do the values work it just opens up all those

differences as sources of learning because they have then a foundation on which to recognize their commonality can you give us an example of that because I have I had a question

for you about this this often it seems that it can be hard to build coalitions even among you know people who feel they

have something in common because there seems to be a sense that there has to be perfect agreement on everything for there to be common cause so I'm

wondering could you speak to how do these how does how are the differences something we can learn from and that aren't um something that prevents the Coalition from happening okay first of

all coalitions are inherently problematic right because everybody's first priority is not the Coalition everybody's first priority is their own organization and so really what it is is

trying to get a bunch of people with individual interest together in a room and say oh for purpose of of X we're now going to pretend that we all have the

same interest right but they don't and so when it comes to priorities so to go deeper you got to do the values

work see and the values work again it it is emotional it's allowing yourself to be seen um and which means risking the

vulnerability that's involved there uh but others won't allow themselves to be seen unless you don't you allow yourself to be seen uh and you know I was going back to those moments of hurt moments of

hope I mean that's often how we learn from what we care for when we allow others to share those moments we're communicating at a different level and

we're communicating about value and what's remarkable as I found in almost every part of the world

um being a human and growing up is not easy uh we face all kinds of challenges uh we have hurts we have hopes often early in life we have the

experiences that really shape our values what we value and and doing the work to go back and find those experiences and be able to articulate them it takes

something that's been an influence on us and turns it into a resources for a resource for us and Charles Taylor the moral philosopher T to Mill for years talks about the importance of learning

how to articulate your moral sources and he's not talking about philosophy he's talking about lived experience being able to put into words yeah I I had this

this was tough this dealing with this bullying and so and so happened this happened when you recount a moment like that people get the emotional meaning of it and you say oh I I'm afraid of

emotion no the emotion communicates and so then people can connect to that because usually the other part of the story is so how did I what what we'll ask well how'd you learn deal with that

and then that'll often come to something like well there was this friend or well there was this teacher or well there was

my mom moms are an amazing source of hope all over the world uh because someone who's there for you you have value no question when lots of other

people don't see you that way that is a communication of value of being worthy of love that's a big deal so being able to access and share those kinds of

experiences that's when we get real okay so when you say that differences between us can be a source of learning they can be this really

Illuminating experience are you talking about political differences are you talking about identity experience differences could all of those any of

those be I think the critical question is what's our values Foundation here right what are the terms on which we're engaging you know James bwin had had a

at Le was attributed to him we can argue and I can still love you providing we not arguing about my Humanity or my right to exist so there are boundaries of course there's boundaries but when

you get to the Val the lived experience values thing um it it's a different kind of conversation just being a finding the courage to share creates a different

context because then people are allowing each other they're seeing each other that can develop a kind of trust and then a kind of openness and a Readiness

to learn together because we're not here trying to prove how great we are in this or that or look at all my Great accomplishments that's how we're we're here to learn and we're here to learn

how to empower ourselves and others as humans so yeah I mean look the first time we taught public narrative the story of self how do I communicate um

outside the US was at the NHS in the UK people said oh Brits are never going to talk about themselves come on it's all stiff up let well that lasted about 10

minutes uh and then Jordan uh it was like oh no in this culture people will not talk especially Arab men will never talk that took maybe 20 minutes W it

because it's inside here and we want to be seen and we want to see others but it's often very dangerous or we think it's dangerous so we build our walls and

when we wall ourselves in to protect ourselves we also wall everybody else out that was Hillary Clinton's problem uh there there could be no relational connection because of the of the defense

and she had very good reasons for having walls but when those walls are there it's like we get pushed off of it and and so once you create a context like

that then the fact that you know I'm Muslim and you're Jewish it it becomes sources of learning of

experience of of information but the foundation is respect and and you know the

respect just for a moment think about a moment specific moment in which you felt disrespected would you felt

disrespectful what it feel like just say the words what it feel like what it feel like yeah yeah yeah that's a very brief efficient definition of how it felt what

what else what do I feel like what else humiliating humiliating what else betray yeah not such a good

thing right what about thinking of a moment when which you felt respected you really felt respected what'd that feel

like gratifying what else what else yeah powerful loving what else

yeah kind of good thing what about a moment in which you felt respect for someone else how did that feel inspiring

inspiring what else proud what else what else like an invitation curiosity

learning what about a moment in which you felt disrespect for someone else and be honest when you felt disrespect for that person what

else yeah what else yeah I mean it turns out that it's probably a better deal to give and receive respect isn't it than the

opposite and and so when we agree then this is the basis on which we're going to work together uh we're going to uh know that we're being seen uh and being

seen and knowing we're being seen being valued knowing we're being valued uh being heard knowing we're being heard is kind of a

fundamental so when we set up a learning situation we start with that and then we set ground rules like you know um something that's called U what's it called

uh well we call it Vegas rules what happens in Vegas St Vegas in other words like we respect oh the chadam house rules yeah shut thank you

that's I like Vegas better Vegas is more direct uh things like that things like Step Up step back you know Step Up step back no like if you're used to a lot of

air time step away and if you don't and if you're not the first time we taught this uh work in in Jordan I learned the Arabic

version which was when you're comfortable speak when you're comfortable speaking it may be time to be silent when you're comfortable silent

it may be the time to speak and sort of don't disappear into your comfort but Step Up in ways that either are letting

go of space or owning space these kinds of practices that we agree on are really helpful not that they're imposed yeah it's a huge difference say here's the

rules we got to that's it's a whole different process because then we own it one other element I'll say that goes with this is that you we have time as a

norm got to be on time and on time which is important yeah I mean it's respectful of other people's time and it's kind of we come up with what we call a norm

correction oh God what am I talking about public shaming no uh it's like somebody walks in late and nobody says anything well now we have a new Norm you can shop late I mean because Norms exist

in the practice of them yeah so okay so maybe the deal is you have have to sing a 10 minute a 10c song uh you know if you're late yeah if you're late or uh or

a dance uh why don't you provide a dance from your own culture or uh maybe you could be a a vegetable uh you know what does a broccoli look like you know the

idea is it's something light but it's recognition that we took responsibility for this and so we need to honor that and recognizing in in in this kind of

way all this goes to set up contexts in which people are much more willing to take risks and allow themselves to be seen and you

know I think the place that I was most uh cautioned about was Japan our first Workshop in Tokyo people are not going to talk about themselves it's just not

going to happen Okay uh maybe 30 minutes because once uh this one particular person who

was a leader in social work in Osaka sort of broke the ice and boy it was like a damn breaking because then you know then people could

share and it it like sort of released the kind of moral energy that was there it made it one of the best workshops I've ever experienced I mean at the end

it was you know Bonsai I mean no no I mean it was uh it was a terrific so you know people are people and we learn how to deal with things in different ways

our cultures are distinct but the challenge of being a person it's not that different and and when you experience that that's what makes it

it's not like oh theoretically XYZ no it's experiential that's why the class that I the classes I teach with people from 35 40 countries it's such a great

learning space because there we create a values based Community around learning and so then people are able to see each other and learn with each other and they become like I say each other's teachers

and so these distinct traditions and cultures and languages they become sources of uh of richness because you have a common

ground and the common ground is not oh we all the common ground is not some concept the common ground is shared feeling about what we value and about

the value of humans or the value of Hope or the value that's what I mean by values and that's that's why putting people first is such a great place to

start Marshall I have to say I'm I'm wondering if anyone else is having this experience that um you have been involved in some of the major campaigns

that have made change um in America in particular and more broadly as well that we are familiar with these kind of load stars of social movements um and you

have spent much of your time educating and working with learning from and teaching people to go out and become part of that snowflake model of creating

change I did not think that in this conversation we would talk so much about feelings and so much about values I thought we might be hearing more from

you about you know this one time you know when I was working with Cesar Chavez and this happen or this was a an approach we took that didn't work and this was one that really worked and

so I'm wondering for SP if anyone else is surprised by this particularly because we are here in a university in which as you and I were discussing just before we

started emotion is often understood to be unserious and off the table in scholarly conversation so I'm just wanted to kind

of get a read on the room and say what is your sense of of this I'm finding an an incredibly Illuminating Foundation because well part of what I hear you

saying is you must start there that this is the basis if you want to talk about getting someone elected or repealing a ballot initiative you have to do this

first is that a fair assessment that this is at a big scale at a small scale you need to know how to have build these connections when you're forming a team

when you're forming a community yeah if you don't do this work there's a whole lot of inference there's a whole lot of projection there's a whole lot of uh stereotyping

and you really can get through a lot of that if you create a context in which we can really allow ourselves to be seen and and and that that yeah I mean see I

was blessed by being introduced to organizing in a social movement yes and the Civil Rights Movement now there's no way you could have a civil rights movement without a lot of Hope a lot of

Sal solidarity a lot of faith a lot of Courage a lot of that was rooted in the black church which was a fundamental place of experence a lot of that was rooted in song and

singing yeah this the shared emotional presence the coated emotional presence that that music enables yeah it wasn't an an accompaniment it was constitutive

of the movement and so and then with the Farm Workers it was same thing I mean it was a different it was Mexican largely

Mexican Catholic culture uh and uh and so like well we had a at in the beginning of our movement we had a march to Sacramento from deleno this was like

280 mile March it's like 28 days whatever it was and it was going to be called a March but it turned out that it was in the spring uh it was during Lent

Lenton season and so it stopped being a March it became a pedig naion which is a pilgrimage and then this pilgrimage then arrived at Sacramento on Easter Sunday

and so the engagement and Our Lady of wupe went in front which so it was a blend Mexican culture uh uh the faith

cultures uh and and this was about building a union this was about that so it was incredible source of strength uh

and and so that's been my experience with movements that movements because they're about values they're not just about transactions um they do values work it

it sort of in these movements I was involved people had to people did the work of finding courage within themselves finding a voice that they hadn't expressed fundamental but then they did

that in community so it was a community finding a way to speak that it hadn't but then they also found they had resources that could be turned into

power and uh you know the classic example for us was Montgomery bus boyc where people I don't you folks heard of Rosa Parks yeah they when they got tired

no it was actually strategy yeah yeah she was secretary NAACP chapter she was trained in organizing and they wanted to file a lawsuit so she got arrested and but what they discovered

was that they all had resources that could be turned into Power what do you see when you look down what do you see what do you

see yeah everybody had feet now if they use their feet to walk to work and deny the bus country their bus Fair instead of using their feet to get on the bus and give the bus company the bus Fair

they could turn individual dependency on the bus to the bus company's dependency on an United Community and that transformation from Individual

dependency to Collective power that's at the heart of it but it goes back to our own resources a lot of it is kind of also how we think about power because that's

the other part yeah and there's a lot of misunderstanding I I think people people think power is something you have but if you need what I've got more

than I need what you've got who's got the power you need what I've got more than I need what you've got who's got the power and what if it's

reversed yeah see Power is an influence created through interdependency because we live in interdependent world the question is what are the terms of interdependency

now we may have a common interest so by combining our efforts we can create a whole lot more capacity a lot more power with each other like for a credit union a co-op things like that but if we're in

a situation where resources we need are being held by someone else like decision making whatever it might be uh and uh from their perspective uh their our

resources don't matter to them well then we have a problem because that enables them to substitute their will for our own and substitute their interest for our interest and then we have a situation of domination

and so then what do you do well what you have to do then is find in resources you have like your feet how to develop it's how to explore the terms of interdependence that's why I was up here

boycotting grapes yeah because the employers needed to sell grapes well we found that we could connect with Canadians here uh and people would agree not to buy not to buy them see we

discovered a point of interdependency that we could reverse there's like um there's a saying in Spanish which means people don't come and look at the prickly Paar Cactus

except when it's bearing fruit and that's used to describe politicians showing up in the Rus just before elections and oh there's fruit here right now oh let's go to the fruit elections over no more fruit you don't

see the politician again in other words there's moments of interdependency that creates opportunity to change the interests of those whose

resources we need power is that it's a form of interdependence it's fundamental to how we structure societies but we sort of

say power oh they got so much power well uh they got a lot of resources the question I may have the only food store in town I got the only food store give me a lot of power right yeah but Gandhi

comes to town everybody goes on a fast my power's gone right they don't need what I have so it introduces much more kind of flexibility and Imagination

I mean Gandhi used salt we used grapes the American colonist used tea I mean ways of discovering resources that were shared that were needed by those whose

resources we needed that we could shift their interest in that way so so that's where strategy is because strategy is

simply how to turn what you have into what you need to get what you want basically and and so it's imaginative it's creative it's a verb um we don't

like nounce it's verb right strategy is not something you have it's something you do it's a practice and the word comes from the Greek uh Str strata which

was word for field and the Army was called strata because its idea was to take the field uh the general was called Stratos and Stratos was up here on the hill having an overview developing a

theory of change which we call theory of change a hypothesis if we deploy our people this way then that that and then the soldiers down in the valley they were called tacticus This is where we

get strategy and tactics strategy is the theory of change tactics are the activities through which we test that theory or we or we enacted and the

challenge in strategy is that when a cloud comes between the top of the mountain and the valley and people up here think they have the whole truth because they have the overview people

down here in the valley no we got the whole truth because we're in the context we know the fact is they need each other to get anything close to the whole truth and a lot of organizations have huge

problems with this huge problems with so there's a fight between tension right yeah no we know it all just do exactly what we say no you don't know anything

you know we're gonna do what we well come on that's a problem yeah so creating the capacity for strategizing is really important how we structure who

strategizes where the where the the the authority is for strategizing what the process actually looks like this is the first book I wrote is called why David

sometimes wins yes and it's about strategic imagination strategic creativity where it looks like it's surprising that Goliath

doesn't win why how does that work what are the conditions you can create to be strategically imaginative and a lot of goes back to understanding the power

dynamics so that's that's the the the power part and and narrative is the motivation the values part and you need

both you need both because otherwise as you said it's transactional it's you know give me your vote for this but that's extraordinarily different than we

are on a pilgrimage together because we are committed and as you said no one forced us to join we are here because we are compelled to be here by our own

internal passions and commitments and we travel together yeah see this this word commitment really matters um commitment

to other people yes because transactions are I you've ever been someplace where you say oh I just got networked yeah yeah see you were being turned into a

resource not a human right and so you felt somebody was mining your resources but it was the critical point in relationship is like you may have a very interesting conversation with somebody you have I

mean relationships are B based on difference as much as commonality I mean because there's got to be something interesting I mean if you're all exactly the same what's interesting what are you g to talk about it's just not so so it's

a combination but you may find uh a person of interest and you go you have a great conversation you have coffee and say oh uh let's get together again next

week uh I got exams next week uh well how about the week after that uh I got people coming from out of town how about a week after that um well uh why don't I

sent you an email what just happened in in a very uh a very esoteric sociological definition you just got

dumped yeah okay that's what happened because there was no commitment see and and the risk of taking commitment of making commitment to another person which is what you say we're going to

meet again okay that's what gives a future see transactions have no future they're just in the now the way you create a future is through commitment in

this way and so when that commitment is made then then you have a foundation for Learning and growth and and and continuity but without that commitment

you make to another person or other people there nothing there you know there's no there's nothing you're not building anything and so relationships create a

future and without relationships we're not creating Futures we're just like in transaction world yeah and there's so

many so many sources of turning us into transactional actors that it really has to be resisted uh and recognize we're being

dehumanized uh it's not all transaction no future and that's one of the real problems in our politics it turns everything into Market now here you're in much better shape than we are and I

know you may say well we got problems yeah you got problems not like ours with all due respect uh I mean we don't have functional parties uh we don't have a

civil society is incredibly weakened and so with the absence of of people making commitments to one another to work together you lack the Civic infrastructure that you need in order to

have a democratic politics and so that's another reason we say practicing democracy because if we're not learning to practice democracy in our lives yeah

that was D toal's insight about when he came to the US in 1830s and said individualism problem of individualism democracy and individualism well it turned out there were all these Civic

associations yeah and his view was well that was really important because we have to have ways that we can be drawn out of our individual self-interest into a broader understanding of common

interest that's what we learn when we associate with others we learn with and from each others we don't it's not some isolated thing we develop the effective bonds that can support solidarity and we

can learn how to govern ourselves which he called habits of the heart and so that kind of he called them great free schools of democracy well in our country boy there they are so weakened it's a

real problem and that's one reason I wrote the book I mean it's kind of like this is something we have to we have to create but nobody can create if it's not

us and we do have that capacity and that capability and we have throughout history throughout our lives so it's recognizing in our own our own worth and

value um can I ask for a time check that clock is stopped as it turns out so okay so I have been 100% hogging

Marshall um so I'm gonna stop that now um and say I've been giving very long answers to short questions so

it's 100% on you I I accept it so um let me just say uh we would love to hear from you do you have

questions about things that Marshall has spoken about do you have questions about your context here um at UFT or your lived experience there any comments you

want to make really like to hear from you well here's a familiar face from my class on monuments and tearing down public memorials so oh and sorry can you introduce

yourself tell us your name tell us what program you're in as well just we have a sense my name is Ty Shamus I'm in my fourth year I'm dou majoring in political science and American

studies yeah good luck with American stud but my question was do you think fear can have a positive role in enacting change or more anthetic to

values like now it's a great question because we're hardwired for it and and evolutionarily that was probably a very

good thing saber-tooth tiger flight okay good thing freeze good thing I don't know about the fight part I've never quite understood how that relates Tigers but but that gave us an evolutionary

Advantage but once we started Living with other people in broader communities to react fearfully to any sort of unexpected surprising potentially

threatening thing was a real problem so we had to develop culture means to manage our fears and manage our our hearts that's where culture comes in and

that's where hope comes in and and that's where solid that's where solidarity to combat isolation love relationship that's where sense of self-

wor to counter self-doubt it often goes with fear comes in so fear fear I don't know if there's any Dune fans here the

Dune books you know Dune yeah okay great yeah no it's really cool yeah because I read the books before the movie and this latest version is much better than anyway that's a side conversation but

there's a scene uh in the first book where Paul maiv who is the you know the hero uh has to confront his fears uh and yes it's the you got to put you have to

put his hand in this pain box uh this was the Benny gazer witches right and that was their yeah I'm looking for some affirmation yeah and so you have some

right here so so before that uh she said uh that what she said this fear is the mind killer that really stuck with me and it

is so true it is so true uh because it's reactive it's protective and it's not creative or constructive and so the

challenge is countering fear I mean you can mobilize around fear when you mobilize around fear then you you take away people's

agency because what you're saying is you have no role here there are these others who have imposed this thing on you and it's all their fault and they have the

power and so all you can do is believe in me and if you believe in me then I'm your avatar and then that's it and that's how authoritarian movements work

that's how fascist movements work they they mobilize but they mobilize dependency not autonomy just the opposite when you mobilize around hope

you are affirming the fact that we have capacity that we have possibility and so it constructs agency and it constructs agency with each other and so that opens

up to creativity to possibility and to actually dealing with the problems which the other is a misdirection uh entirely so yeah fear is important in Union

organizing one of the best places to learn organizing that I had with Union organizing because the opposition is right there it's not distant it's not remote there's somebody there that can

fire you they they can reassign you they can do all sorts of things to you because they have that power and so you have to figure out how to develop the courage to overcome the fear that is a

natural response to that and so when you learn organizing in that context you learn how to work with people to combat Their Fear uh it's often because it's

relational it's often Oh I thought it was just my problem Oh Jee there's more more oh oh there's other oh there's some sense of possibility sense of could be and what you're doing all through a

union campaign is you're trying to support hope you're trying to counter fear you're trying to build solidarity because if you don't do that you lose the election because and so for me that was

one of the most valuable learning experiences about fear that's a really important question you for coming my name is I'm a

Europe major in my third year under graduate and I just want to say that I found this perspective this B truly

refreshing to a perspective good especially because as you said we all comp Cal background

experien difficulty being person growing up yeah just the experience of a person in can more than we

think and it's refreshing also because I think as a university student and being involved in associations looking like seeing how

people deal with the respond to issues that are really in the world right now I see a lot of divide and a lot of uh

there's the lack of willingness to sit down with the other side and have a mature and respectful

because that's as you said the foundation so I guess my com question is how questions do end with the question

mark no no I appreciate no no no no I appreciate you could answer because of course it's really complex but how do we

approach that in a university setting where everyone is scared to to talk about certain issues scared of what it what the reaction

might be uh and genuinely just sit down have a conversation and listen to the other side and present the other well it's hard it's hard right no

but I think what we've been talking about is how to create the conditions in which in which that's becomes possible in other words investing in the ground rules invested in the core understanding

investing in what we're doing here you know that we're not labeling each other here see the trouble with labeling is it's an abstraction and we're trying to fit people into this box and it takes

away their humanity and and it it wipes out the capacity for engagement because we're engaging with an abstraction see sometimes we're so uncomfortable with

uncertainty that we create this it's all this or it's all that well nothing's all this and all that in life and so what that does it makes it harder for us to

engage with each other as humans because we've just dehumanized each other so creating the context really matters a whole lot and if you create the context

then you know things can happen but often that's all dismissed we're just supposed to be polite let's be polite to each other that'll solve everything and

what horse fill in the blank no I no I mean it is it is Con a convenient fiction that um everything's great in status quo you know everything's great

there's no power differences everything's fine all we have to do is be polite to each other and then we'll find Solutions I'm sorry for the sarcasm

in my voice but I teach in a place where that is a very common approach of oh yeah let's be civil it's like being civil replaces being

understood or or understanding or dealing with challenges that are real you know differences are how we how we learn they conflict is how we grow you

know it's sort of we have this idea that conflict's a bad thing it's an essential thing for learning for growth for democracy the question is conflict that is not destructive but can be

constructive but when we're conflict diverse and we know there's a conflict there but it's buried and we're averse to it what we're doing is assuring that there's going to be a really big conflict

later as opposed to actually engaging with now and putting it on the table and finding ways to engage is that yeah no I

totally agree and I think what you said about truly understanding the other when you understand that perspective you can not excuse it but you can see the

background of how that person that person experiences LED them to think this way and I think that's you know it's hard but often when

confronted with that with you know very contrary if the question is not how do I how do I persuade this person that

they're wrong because I'm right versus the question oh tell me more oh that's interesting why it's

engaging your curiosity rather than your defensiveness and see curiosity is a it's an amazing gift that we have unfortunately it often gets Stamped Out when people are growing up but every

child is curious and that Curiosity that can take us to a different place it's not we're not going to agree necessarily at all but at least

we'll understand more about where that's coming from and that can help us strategically because we can understand what's going on rather than just saying oh you're bad bad bad I'm good good good

not helpful yeah thank you for the questions really really good one back all right good morning thank you

very much for your talk I think it was very refreshing to see organizing in a very academic setting reflecting Tru stands for I'm a b curious on whether

you've been able your time in harv part of student organizing and if you have something perhaps that You' learned from that and something that that you could give us within a student Society here

that isn't maybe the most ganized or the most civil act well I teach organiz and and I teach the practice of organizing and so I'm not very popular

with various Deans see now when they're smart they say better that folks learn how to do

this well than not we we uh we uh designed a course at at Stanford We Now teach a version at

Stanford uh and they had the wisdom to say yeah better than folks learn now that takes a lot of Courage from an Administration

and a lot of wisdom most administrations are not there at all and at my University the administration was nowhere there which is one of the things that created all the weaponization of

anti-Semitism and all this horrible stuff that's been happening that puts University administrators in an awful light because they make themselves the problem rather than being a place in

which people can engage and challenge one another and learn so so people in a part of my class is people got to do an organizing project

but they have to do it with people they have to whom they have access somebody says oh I want to I want to work with h you know people in in the flood planes of

Pakistan okay good so now how much access do you have no here you do in other words you can learn how to do a practice here that then you take with

you and shift to a different context it's like learning to drive learning to D this be about learning to drive in Delhi is a really challenging thing I

don't know if anybody's been to Del six Lanes or whatever but uh but if you want to learn to drive and you're in Cambridge okay well let's learn to drive and you can do that now you're gonna

have to do some adaptation but you've got a basic practice you have a basic understanding so that's how we approach it so people do organizing projects

about changing the curriculum about financial aid about uh uh uh terms of uh student organizing about uh um any

number of things um and then of course in the community too I mean because you know Harvard sits in this very you know exotic Place uh and it always complains

it doesn't have enough money for anything which is kind of remarkable because it has more money than the it has as much money or more than the Vatican I think there sort of in

competition for uh you know most wealthy nonprofit so yeah and of course we were engaged in this last year where there was so much mobilization organizing

going on around Israel Palestine and you know the administration kind of freaked out and the freaking out then it sort of makes things a lot worse columia is a great

example of that UCLA is a great example of that they they they had no clarity about their own about the values that they were there to uphold and the

courage to do it and it's really surprising sometimes when people have a lot of power a lot of resources are fearful it's a very dangerous situation because they they they don't appreciate

the impact of what they do or don't do so so yeah so I mean I think student organizing look I mean my first organizing project was trying to get

Harvard to sell its stock in Mississippi Power and Light Company in 1964 so uh it's been a good school for me uh and when my wife and I were doing a

midcareer uh degree at the Kennedy School we organized the whole midcareer class to challenge the school on curriculum on quality of teaching and all that and so the next year they asked

me to or to teach a class on organized that was a smart move better to get this guy inside you know than outside but it's

so the challenge is when we see how can I say Public public demonstration can be expressive or

strategic or both sometimes the expressiveness really matters I want my voice to be heard because my voice is not being heard so by God you're going

to hear my voice okay that's cool is it strategic how does it build power what am I building through this so unless

there's a strategic lens to go with the expressive lens then we often wind up just giving the opposition Fuel and so it's being it's having the

the the the capacity uh the agreement to make those kinds of choices and sometimes it's really hard because things can happen that are really awful and people just want to say

this is really awful this has to stop and you know in organizing urgency is one of the really important things for motivating so it's anger and by anger I

don't mean rap but I mean the way we feel when we encounter a profound dissonance between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be I mean watching George Floyd murder in my

country you know if you didn't say outrageous what the hell was going on with you and so that's what I mean by because it can create a powerful source of Courage but not if it goes with fear

if it goes with hope it would be very very helpful so I don't know you know student organizing is organized and it's a great opportunity for

learning but it's important to take advantage of it as a source of learning we all get in trouble when we think we we got the answer when we think

we're done learning we know it all when somebody comes on with that that's one person to not listen to because they're fooling themselves how

can we know the future how can we know how to deal with the unexpected how can we know that we can develop muscles that can help us engage with those kinds of circumstance like we can't predict the

future we can prepare for it and recognizing the importance of that work with each other boy that's so foundational and often especially social

media makes it so easy now to share information show up in this place bunch of people show up nothing's built uh and uh that's that's the difference between

mobilizing and organizing and and there's just way too much of that so I think student organizing is an opportunity to learn how to

organize and and pay attention to each other draw on whatever sources are around you know and there are sources I mean there is such a thing as history there are uh actually some histories

that are really good uh you know it's interesting in the military at West Point one of their major uh sources of instruction is history is reading

histories learning in contexts how conflict was managed how it was dealt with and that's what we learned from biographies that's what we can learn from history so you know that stuff's

really important how did the Civil Rights Movement work why you know how how did this happen last year you know uh how was South Africa actually how was

that done and it's not from an academic perspective see academic perspective we're trying to say what were the conditions that enabled this to happen

we don't say how was it that people were creative enough to figure out how to make this happen I have to say that when I went back when I started my PhD

program uh which I was 50 I because when I started my PhD uh and there was uh in social movement there social movement literature there was a piece called the

Insurgency of paraly of the paraly and it was a classic and what it was about the farmw worker removement and it pointed out that what our success is we had in 60s and 70s nothing to do with us

the conditions were right that kind of pissed me off because said what do you mean it had nothing to do with us so that set me on the track to write what became my first Journal piece my masters

and my dissertation was about strategic capacity how we develop the capacity to strategize effectively and do that and

it's interesting because social sciences tend to be so focused on probability that they miss the significance of possibility and social movements are all about

possibility so you know look you got a great opportunity to learn this stuff and you know uh

yeah yeah no no I appreciate no I appreciate the question really I it's very important it's very important to learn use this opportunity for learning for

learning you can do that thank you for that yeah I think we have time for one more question in the back

yeah are we yeah that would be great thank you oh good and like you said when you were answering the question just now said

organizing and I don't know like I kind of just came to this because I saw that I was you can still buy it I do have a little capitalist Keen

there like I'm seeing right now on like Wikipedia like the KY school has like very 21 heads of state cabinet officials military leaders heads of central banks

legislators and these are like often people especially like right now that we're organizing again and like what does it mean to

at a place that literally funnel people into like oppressive posessive no no it's a great question because what am I doing there where

neoliberalism is really the official ideology I mean you know economics is the master study of the universe well one thing is it you got them close at

hand they're proximate you know and there is something to be said for that you know the thing about keep your friends close but your enemies closer there is something about learning no but

see students come there for a whole array of reasons many of them they want to fix things they want to fix the world they come from countries where they want to change things my own country uh and

that's what they think they're coming to learn and then they get there and then they find that economics is the master science of understanding the universe

and it's very it's disempowering it's frustrating so the classes that I teach are the opposite and there are ways in

which people can find each other and develop capacity and then you know go out in the world with support one of my one of my former students I'm most proud

it was a young woman a woman named nin hasak who was a midre student back in 200 10 or so uh she'd been part of the uh of the um negotiation support unit

for the PLO when they were negotiating when there was negotiations and had sort of that's not working um there was something called the Israel Palestine negotiations Network which was sort of

back channel uh where they came to Harvard to learn how to negotiate not to negotiate with each other but it was a very kind of she was co-chair of that but you know things were going nowhere

and so we connected and she went back to amand uh and then she decided she was going to take the the learning uh and and bring it home and she started

something called Ahad which means like it means like a family that's not blood related it's sort of like Community uh

and for the last 10 12 years she's been doing amazing work developing leadership doing organizing campaign she done some 35 campaigns uh in uh Jordan in Lebanon

and Palestine uh and uh and for a year and a half we were working in Syria with young people before they started killing people there so and and she has just

made an incredible contribution um she does an online class sort of mod on mine but it's in Arabic uh she reaches people in 11 countries and it's kind of all

sort of under the radar in a sense you can't travel from one country to the other very easily but boy you can through the internet so so on the basis of that they've been forming an Arabic

organiz an Arab organizers Association and I was in Tunis a couple years ago and met with some of her alumni and a lot of the old folks were very uh how

can I say uh disillusioned the young people were discouraged but not disillusioned because they were doing work they were working in health they were working in education they were building social infrastructure that

needed to be there when opportunities would present themselves and so forth so um meate your

question um I mean like yeah what does it oh oh yeah about the bad guys yeah yeah yeah okay no it's yeah there are odd things I mean uh the guy that was

challenging Shuan ping his son was in my class and one day the CIA showed up and took him away so uh yeah there are those things on the other hand we had a session last week with our new labor

secretary Julie Sue who is great uh and we were able to actually do some teaching about the labor movement the history of Labor movement which nobody knows about but the who the people I'm

working with are my students and and and not just for the class but for what comes after and that's how I've been able to work in all these different countries because it's people rooted in

those countries I mean in January I was uh I was uh in India we did in Delhi and arasi and uh Bangalore but working with people we had been working with people

who had been students people who were adapting see it's it's not there's a big difference of introducing our pedagogy it was said a woman named Samar dudin in

Jordan said oh I see this is not a blueprint it's a road map yes big difference look within your own identity your own culture your own traditions for the sources of Hope of solidarity and

all the rest of that and that turns out to be a very useful powerful way to learn and look at things so um so that's

who that's who I'm teaching that's who I'm learning with better said because every class is different and it really is like having a conversation with the

future twice a week yeah and well that's pretty cool uh and because we're all learning and and that's where my hope comes from but that's also why I can how

I can rationalize or just ify uh teaching where I teach because it goes beyond where I'm teaching and that in a way is the real now we've also invaded the School of Public Health we're also

invading the law school now there's a group sort of re reforming legal education to be in support of organizing which is a really important shift in law schools we're doing a class at the

medical school uh on health Communications it's not about sending uh information it's about building the capacity of people to engage with each

other around Health practices so there's just a lot of opportunities that you can have to create snow snowflakes in other words what that means is each person then builds their own team each person

builds their own team and it's a way for Learners to become teachers which is really at the heart of what we're trying to teach so thank you for that

question well we have run out of time so just before we wrap up I want to say thank you to Dr dumad my colleague who is the manager of our conference

facilities here who is the reason we all got to have this conversation today she noted this and she was on it she can spot a great event faster than anyone I

know thank you Daria she also found us this morning when we were lost she found honestly I have not encountered an end to Daria's abilities I have to say to our front of house staff thank you

for making this happen and of course to sapna Salim um um who is a colleague of Professor ganza and who whose thoughtfulness and competence made

planning this event so easy and so um pleasurable and it's not always like that so thank you so much sapna thank you to all of you for coming today I know there are many other places you

could have been thanks for coming here and thank you Marshall very grateful you came thank you thank you for hosting this and thank you to all of

you perhaps less for what you're doing than for what you will do because that's you know you're shiing the future and so you can do it you have the capacity you

have the opportunities so take advantage of that okay thank you thanks so much for the opportunity to work with you thank you thanks everybody