Barack Obama didn’t win the White House with great speeches, sound policies and disciplined campaigning alone. He won with organization – built from the ground up.

Winning the ground game is also the key to success in Canadian politics. And it takes more than volunteers and canvassing to run a world-class ground game.

No one knows more about winning on the ground than Marshall Ganz, the architect of Obama’s ground campaign. He’s at HFX09 to share his expertise in building a successful field campaign.

The Obama team didn’t simply hand out tasks – they turned organizers into leaders, with the skills, strategies and data they needed to win. Organizers learned to connect their own story to the campaign, to bring their own hope for change to the lives of voters and build a grassroots movement.

Since his early days with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Ganz has been at the forefront of organizing popular political movements in the United States. As a lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, he has continued to develop innovative organizational models for contemporary politics.