Fuente: © Barack Obama
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US ELECTIONS 08: BARACK OBAMA: Blog: The Education of an Organizer

/noticias.info/ Organizing to bring people back into politics is not a cost, but an investment in rebuilding the democratic infrastructure of our public life under assault for far too many years. - Marshall Ganz, March 2007

Last weekend, over 3600 volunteers took part in an intensive three day training program to prepare them for their work this summer as Obama Organizing Fellows. These volunteers will spend the next six weeks working on the ground across the country to organize, register voters, recruit new volunteers and help build out the infrastructure we'll need to compete across all 50 states this November.

In addition to the basic skills and fundamentals of campaigning, the Organizing Fellows were taught many of the underlying concepts that have been at the heart of this campaign. As Ohio General Election Director Jeremy Bird explained:

A critical part of taking leadership is being able to articulate for others who you are, where you come from and what challenges have shaped the life choices that led you to this campaign. As a leader you must tell people who you are and why you're there.

The importance of narrative and personal connections is something that Barack learned early on in his career as as community organizer. A recent Los Angeles Times article takes a look at the origins of some of these concepts, and the contribution that one man, Marshall Ganz, made to the philosophy of this campaign:

If Barack Obama succeeds in his historic quest for the White House, the Illinois senator will owe a large debt to Marshall Ganz's passion for such narratives -- and for the way this graying, portly man taught Obama's top field organizers to weave thousands of individual volunteers' stories into a social movement.

Ganz, 65, has no official role in the Obama campaign ... [But] when the Obama campaign held a series of "Camp Obama" training sessions around the country last summer, Ganz was brought in to hold two-day discussions of personal narrative and leadership.

Campaign officials estimate that 200 to 300 organizers were trained at about a dozen Camp Obamas -- three of them co-led by Ganz.

The effort's biggest success came in caucus states like Iowa, where tightknit organizations were better able to get people to the meeting sites.

But grass-roots efforts also paid off in South Carolina and Wisconsin and helped keep the margin small in Indiana.

Ganz's "style of organizing really does speak to who Barack is as a candidate," said Obama field organizer Buffy Wicks, 30, who ran the campaign's grass-roots efforts in California and Texas.

"Marshall really believes in empowering people and teaching them how to become community organizers."

Maggie Fleming, who attended a Camp Obama last summer, said: "Marshall is able to bring this bigger picture of his work with civil rights and with the farmworkers and [connect] people to this idea that this is bigger than just one candidate."

Fleming, 28, the assistant director of a nonprofit environmental education group, later helped form the core of Obama's grass-roots committee in Oakland.

Ganz encourages volunteers to share their own life stories with voters, in the belief that by speaking from the heart, they turn the tedious -- phone-banking, door-knocking -- into a communal mission. It's not policy but passion that he teaches.

"It's counterintuitive," Ganz said. "At Camp Obama the tendency is, 'I need to know all of the arguments.' No. You need to learn to talk from your own experiences. It's a very empowering thing."

Earlier in the year, we sat down with Ganz to talk about his experience as an organizer, his thoughts about Barack, and his take on this movement:

As Ganz himself has pointed out, in modern American politics elections are often very, very close. Over the past six months, we've seen firsthand that effective grassroots mobilization can make the difference between winning and losing.

All summer long, organizers and volunteers will be working in communities across the country to expand on the grassroots networks we've already built, and to lay the groundwork for the general election in November.

This campaign can only succeed if you take its future into your own hands. You can sign up now to volunteer, and the campaign will contact you as needs arise in your community. But the most immediate impact you can make locally and nationally will always be by plugging into the My.BarackObama.com community. Don't just fill out the volunteer form and wait—fill it out to let us know more about you, but then get started on your own at My.BarackObama.com. notas_de_prensa_archivo