From Mississippi to a Global Community: The Story of Leading Change Network

How It All Started

In 1964, a year before he was due to graduate, Marshall Ganz left Harvard University to volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project, an effort to support the work of African American organizers fighting for the right to vote across the U.S. South. There, he learned about race, power, and politics in America—and that change won’t come unless the people facing problems can author change. Such authorship depends on turning existing resources into the power needed to win change.

For a community to act together with such solidarity, however, there needs to be trained leadership—not just one person, but many. This is organizing. It is about justice; not charity. In Mississippi, it became Marshall’s calling.

Marshall returned home to Bakersfield, California, where Cesar Chavez had launched his campaign to organize the United Farm Workers union. Although he had grown up in the world of the farm worker, Marshall had been oblivious to it. It took his new ‘Mississippi eyes’ to see another community of people of color who also lacked political rights and economic protection—evidence of California’s own rich history of racial discrimination. Mississippi turned out not to be an exception in America, but an aspect of America that needed to change.

After a 28-year ‘leave of absence’ organizing communities, unions, and electoral campaigns, Marshall returned to Harvard to complete his undergraduate degree, earn an MPA at the Kennedy School, and a PhD in sociology. While working on his doctorate, he was asked to develop a course on organizing. In this way, he had the opportunity to integrate his life experience with social science in a pedagogical engagement: it was an opportunity for a conversation with the future.

Building the Foundations

On the faculty full-time since 2000, Marshall was drawn back into the world of practice by his students, beginning with the 2003–4 Howard Dean for President Campaign, a three-year project improving Sierra Club groups’ effectiveness, and launching Camp Obama to organize volunteers in Barack Obama’s 2007–8 campaign for president.

After the Obama campaign, interest in this method of enabling people to begin learning how to translate their values into effective action emerged in education, health care, environmental action, and immigration reform. Three collaborations in particular, with the DREAMer movement, the New Organizing Institute (NOI), and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) anchored the budding network’s U.S.-based work. At the same time, Marshall’s students and collaborators went on to adapt the organizing pedagogy in communities around the world. In 2010 in Amman, Jordan, for example, Nisreen Haj Ahmad launched Ahel, a training institute that developed a core of 27 educators, trained some 3,000 people in organizing, and coached some 17 campaigns in the region.

The same year, Marshall launched an online course at Harvard called Leadership, Organizing, and Action: Leading Change to share this approach with emerging leaders around the world. In the Balkans, for example, the leadership of ‘Serbia on the Move’ adopted the Leading Change Network (LCN) pedagogy as their main theory of change and ran over 10 campaigns in Serbia fighting for medical reform, maternal benefits, and other policy changes. They have since trained more than 3,000 people and developed over 30 educators.

The Dream Becoming a Reality 

The idea for the Leading Change Network (LCN) emerged from conversations with leaders active across diverse domains in multiple countries, who identified a need for a global community of practice to enable organizers, educators, and researchers to learn from one another, improve their practice, and engage others in their work.

In 2012, LCN convened its first Global Gathering of some 100 participants from 20 countries. Ever since, online and offline gatherings have continued to create opportunities for learning, growth, and development. LCN is committed to a culture of craft, evaluation, and learning across institutional, cultural, and geographical boundaries. We have grown to become a community of organizers, educators, and researchers from more than 30 countries who are active in some 36 countries and lead trainings in 30 different languages.

On July 27, 2013, the Leading Change Network (LCN) convened its second Global Gathering – a 3.5-hour-long online organizing conference of 140 people from 29 countries for plenaries, one-on-one meetings, breakout sessions, and discussion groups. The session was organized by a leadership team of ten organizers.

On November 15, 2014, LCN convened its third Global Gathering – a 4-hour-long online conference. That enabled 89 social change practitioners from 23 countries working in 11 different sectors to come together to learn from the experiences of others and forge a shared consciousness.

In 2015, LCN convened its first Global Affiliates Gathering, in Andrevlje, Serbia. It was held over three days, March 27–29, and brought together community organizing practitioners, trainers and coaches from across the globe to discuss trends and challenges in community organizing, and to shape the path for future activities of Global Affiliates. The meeting was attended by professor Marshall Ganz, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government; Rawan Zeine, Leading Change Network Board Member; Nisreen Haj Ahmad, Project Coordinator for Global Affiliates; and Sung E Bai, Leading Change Network Executive Director. Sixteen representatives from the following Global Affiliates member organizations also attended: Serbia on the move (Serbia), Ahel (Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon), New Organizing Institute (USA), United We Dream (USA), Planned Parenthood (USA), Community Organizing Japan (Japan), Tatua Kenya (Kenya), Haiyya (India) and ReThink Health (USA). The GA Gathering established that members have jointly trained over 32,000 people in approximately 350 trainings and have coached and/or led over 200 campaigns. In total, over 2 million people have been engaged through their campaigns. Between 2016 and 2018, LCN became less active as a network organization. 

Adapting, Revamping, Innovating

The LCN community decided to relaunch LCN in 2018 in response to growing challenges to democracy around the world, our desire to turn these challenges into opportunities, and an urgent need to acquire and master the skills needed to turn motivation into successful collective action. LCN was launched as an online conference in 2018 attended by 350 people from 24 countries. This also marked the official start of LCN membership for both individuals and organizations. Between 2018 and 2019, LCN curated 50 learning events, with over 2,900 people attending. 

In 2020, the world faced a pandemic, and with it deteriorating health systems, erosion of workers’ rights, and the silent pandemic of domestic violence came into sharp focus. It was a set of realities that made it critical to rethink our priorities and what role LCN could have in supporting organizers worldwide. A series of Covid sessions were launched that truly engaged a global community of 600 people from 69 countries, with participants sharing their learnings and supporting each other through the Covid pandemic. 

With lockdowns and restrictions on physical meetings, the landscape of organizing has changed. It prompted LCN to think strategically about its future direction and by the end of 2020, Mais Irqsusi had assumed the leadership of LCN. Doing what we espouse – LCN started by tackling the most important question: who are our people? After identifying its constituency, LCN formed an international and diverse advisory board to rethink their strategic direction. At the beginning of 2021, the new team began work framing the future of LCN, starting with internal reflection and then a listening drive in the spring of 2021 that reached over 500 people from our community.  

LCN Today

We are a global community of changemakers who are relentlessly fighting for justice and committed to strengthening the capacity of leaders, organizations, and movements to build real power and drive locally rooted change. We do this by advancing the People, Power, Change framework and the five leadership practices, facilitating access to knowledge, coaching campaigns, rigorous workshops, supporting leaders seed local structures and organizations to build power movements and adapt the framework to their unique contexts, and convening a vibrant community of practice.

Read more about our work here.