The Landscape Around You

Something came up during your governance work. Maybe it was explicit — a specific institution that one group’s spoke mentioned during the decision domain mapping, a local organization that both groups interact with but haven’t approached together. Maybe it was subtler — a realization that some of the decisions you were sorting into “joint” don’t just involve your two groups. They involve a school board, a county commission, a mutual aid network that’s been operating in your area longer than either of your groups has existed. Your coordination doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens on ground that’s already occupied.

This chapter is about that ground. The institutional landscape — who’s already working in your community and how your network engages without being absorbed. The legal landscape — what the law says about your rights and your exposure when you take coordinated civic action. And the geographic landscape — what all of this looks like when the nearest allied group is forty miles away or the civic infrastructure is a volunteer fire department and a church.

The throughline is the same: know the terrain you’re operating on. All three are maps — and the purpose of a map is to move through a landscape more effectively, not to admire it from a distance.

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The Institutional Landscape

Your network exists within a field of institutions. Neighborhood associations, faith communities, mutual aid networks, PTAs, local government bodies, nonprofits, unions, civic organizations. Some have been in your area for decades. Some formed last year. Some are well-funded and professionally staffed. Some run on volunteer energy and borrowed meeting space.

The question isn’t whether to engage with them. Your groups are already engaged — as individuals, you attend meetings, donate time, participate in institutional life. The question is how your network relates to institutions as a network. And the honest answer is: carefully.

There’s a dynamic that the research identified in virtually every documented case of grassroots-institutional interaction, and naming it is the only protection against it. The sociologist Philip Selznick studied the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1940s and documented how a federal agency absorbed grassroots opposition by channeling it — offering local leaders seats on advisory boards, creating the appearance of influence without transferring actual decision-making power. The pattern he identified has three mechanisms, and they operate today the same way they did eighty years ago.

Channeling. The institution redirects grassroots energy into its own processes. You came to push for change. You end up on a committee that meets quarterly and advises a board that isn’t required to act on your advice. Your energy is now serving the institution’s legitimacy rather than your community’s priorities. The institution can point to your participation as evidence of community engagement. You can point to nothing that’s changed.

Inclusion without power. A seat at the table without a voice in decisions. You’re invited to meetings, copied on emails, thanked for your input. But the decisions that matter — budgets, hiring, policy — happen in rooms you’re not in, through processes you can’t influence. The inclusion is real. The power is not.

Salience control. The institution appears to address your concerns by highlighting the overlap between your priorities and its existing work — while quietly excluding the areas where your priorities challenge its operations. You came to talk about housing displacement. The meeting agenda focuses on a new community garden program. Both are real needs. But the garden isn’t why you’re here, and the displacement isn’t on the agenda.

These mechanisms aren’t malicious. They’re structural. Institutions operate by institutional logic — continuity, stability, process, self-preservation. That logic tends to domesticate informal energy. A PTA’s job is to support the school, not to challenge the district. A nonprofit’s funding depends on its funders’ priorities, which may not be yours. A local government body’s processes are designed to manage participation, not to empower it. None of this makes institutions adversaries. It makes them institutions. And knowing how they work means your network can engage without being consumed.

The model the documented record supports is complementary partnership — a term from Amanda Tattersall’s coalition research. Your network engages institutions as a partner, not a subordinate. You bring skills, flexibility, and the capacity for rapid coordinated action. They bring infrastructure, history, institutional knowledge, and public legitimacy. Neither absorbs the other. The relationship is defined by the specific thing you’re working on together, not by a general alliance.

The Cowboy Indian Alliance operated this way. Ranchers and tribal communities maintained distinct identities, distinct motivations, and distinct organizational structures while coordinating on the Keystone XL fight. They didn’t merge into one organization. They didn’t adopt each other’s frameworks. They agreed on one thing — opposing the pipeline — and maintained autonomy on everything else. When the fight shifted, each group remained intact, with its own relationships and its own capacity. The coalition didn’t hollow them out.

Your network decides its own institutional posture through conversation — not through these notes and not through a blanket stance. Some institutions in your landscape will be natural partners. Some will be worth engaging cautiously. Some won’t be worth your coordination’s time. The institutional mapping challenge helps you sort that collectively.

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The Legal Landscape

When your network starts taking joint action visible in civic space — attending government meetings as a coordinated presence, filing public records requests, organizing a community event — the legal environment becomes relevant terrain. This isn’t preparation for confrontation. It’s the civic equivalent of knowing where the fire exits are.

I’m not a lawyer, and these notes aren’t legal advice. What I can do is point you to the resources that will give your network legal awareness — enough to know your rights, recognize when you need professional counsel, and avoid the most common mistakes that groups make when they don’t understand the legal ground they’re standing on.

Your right to assemble and petition. The First Amendment protects your right to gather, protest, petition, and speak on matters of public concern. State and local laws layer additional regulations on top — permit requirements, restrictions on amplified sound, designated free-speech zones, anti-camping ordinances. These regulations vary enormously by jurisdiction, and they’ve shifted significantly in recent years. The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law maintains a US Protest Law Tracker that maps state-level legislation affecting protest rights — hundreds of bills introduced across all 50 states since 2017, with new restrictions on assembly, increased penalties for civil disobedience, and provisions affecting how protests near critical infrastructure are treated. Check it for your state. The landscape is specific to where you are.

Your right to observe government proceedings. City council, county commission, school board, planning board — these are public proceedings. You have the right to attend, observe, and in most cases record. Your right to speak during public comment periods is governed by local rules that vary but generally must be applied evenhandedly — a board can’t allow one group to speak and deny another on the basis of viewpoint. Knowing these rules before you attend matters more than it should.

Your right to public records. The Freedom of Information Act applies to federal agencies. Every state has its own public records law with different scopes, exemptions, and response timelines. The National Freedom of Information Coalition maintains state-by-state guides, template request letters, and guidance on fee waivers. Filing a public records request on behalf of a community interest often strengthens fee waiver arguments, since the information serves the public rather than a private commercial purpose.

When you need a lawyer. If your network is considering any action that carries legal risk — civil disobedience, activities near critical infrastructure, engagement with law enforcement, anything involving permits or regulatory compliance — consult a lawyer first. The National Lawyers Guild maintains a chapter locator at nlg.org and runs legal observer trainings for community groups. Local legal aid organizations can help with public records, government meeting access, and understanding local ordinances. The ACLU’s Know Your Rights guides — available in multiple languages — cover demonstrations, encounters with police, and the right to record. Distribute them to all network members. They’re free, they’re clear, and knowing the basics prevents most of the situations where not knowing them causes harm.

This isn’t a comprehensive legal education. It’s an orientation to the terrain. Your field journal should include the specific resources for your state — the ICNL tracker results, the relevant ACLU guides, the nearest NLG chapter contact, and local legal aid organizations that serve your area. Like the institutional map, the legal map is specific to your geography.

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The Geographic Landscape

Everything I’ve described so far assumes an institutional landscape that’s reasonably populated. Organizations to map. Government meetings to attend. Multiple community groups operating in overlapping territory. In many parts of the country, that assumption holds.

In many other parts, it doesn’t.

If your network is in a rural area, a small town, or an exurban community where the civic landscape is sparse, the challenge isn’t navigating a crowded field. It’s finding civic life where it’s thin on the ground — and recognizing it in forms that urban-centric organizing frameworks don’t always see.

I want to be direct about this because the research was clear: the organizing literature has a density bias. Most case studies, most frameworks, most practical guides assume you can walk to a meeting, that there are multiple organizations within driving distance, that broadband is reliable and the nearest allied group is across town rather than across a county. When rural communities appear in organizing literature at all, they tend to appear as problems — connectivity gaps, isolation, limited institutional infrastructure. That framing misses something important.

Rural America has deep organizing traditions that predate any urban equivalent. Cooperative federations — the Farm Bureau, the Grange, rural electric cooperatives — built durable coordination infrastructure across enormous distances before the telephone was common. The circuit rider model, where a single organizer or minister served multiple communities on a rotating schedule, created connection across sparse networks for two centuries. County-based mutual aid — neighbors helping neighbors with harvest, with illness, with fire — is the oldest form of collective action in the country. Sparse networks are often deeper. Fewer connections, but each one carries more weight.

The discovery protocols for finding civic life in low-density areas look different from urban institutional mapping, but the principle is the same: look for where people already gather, already coordinate, already make decisions together.

County commissioner meetings — in rural areas, often the most accessible and impactful tier of government. They control land use, roads, emergency services, and local budgets. Meetings are public, frequently sparsely attended, and your presence is noticed. That’s both an advantage and a consideration.

Faith communities — churches, mosques, synagogues — serve as the primary gathering infrastructure in many rural areas. They host meetings, coordinate mutual aid, maintain communication networks, and often function as the de facto civic space. Engaging with them doesn’t require sharing their faith. It requires respecting their role and showing up as a community partner.

Volunteer fire departments — in communities without professional fire services, often the most trusted civic institution in the area. They run on the same principle your group does: ordinary people taking responsibility for their community’s safety. Their fundraisers, community dinners, and workdays are gathering points where you meet the people who actually make the community function.

Libraries — in rural areas, often serving as community centers, meeting spaces, internet access points, and information hubs. Library bulletin boards and event calendars are low-tech discovery tools that tell you what’s happening and who’s organizing it.

Agricultural extension offices — the cooperative extension system has maintained a presence in nearly every county in the country for over a century. Extension agents work with farmers, 4-H programs, community development, and food security projects. They know the civic landscape of their county better than almost anyone.

These aren’t second-best alternatives to an urban institutional field. They’re the actual civic infrastructure of communities that have been self-governing for generations. Your institutional mapping adapts to this terrain — map what exists, understand who serves what function, and identify where your network’s skills and energy complement what’s already in place.

The distance question is real. When your nearest allied group is forty miles away, a joint meeting requires planning, travel time, and the logistical coordination that urban networks take for granted. Hybrid meetings — some members in person, some on a call — are a practical necessity, not a compromise. The spokes council model from the last chapter works well for geographic distance: the spokes meet in person or hybrid, carry their groups’ input, and debrief afterward. The coordination doesn’t require everyone in the same room. It requires reliable communication channels and clear mandates.

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Down Home North Carolina demonstrates what permanent rural infrastructure looks like at scale. Founded in 2017, Down Home built county-based chapters across 25 rural North Carolina counties — a footprint spanning roughly 500 miles. Each county chapter operates with local autonomy, elects its own leadership, and sets priorities based on local concerns. Paid local organizers stationed in each region provide continuity that volunteer-only models struggle to maintain. Statewide coordination happens through regular convenings where county chapters share strategy and align on shared campaigns without surrendering local control.

The results are documented. Across the 2020 and 2022 cycles, Down Home’s canvassing operation reached over 600,000 doors across those 25 counties. In districts they organized, results consistently bucked the national rightward trend — not by converting voters but by engaging people who had stopped participating. Year-round organizing rather than campaign-season-only contact built relationships that survived between election cycles. The infrastructure persisted because it was rooted in place, maintained through cycles, and didn’t depend on any single leader or external funder.

Compare that with the Georgia 2020 Election Protection Coalition. Ten organizations turned a state — Fair Fight handled litigation, New Georgia Project focused on registration, Black Voters Matter provided grassroots tools, Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Atlanta provided language access. Specialized division of labor and complementary capabilities produced extraordinary results: 800,000 new voters registered, a state flipped. But the model depended on a single charismatic leader’s profile for fundraising, and the operational infrastructure was sustained by external money rather than local roots. By 2025, both Fair Fight and the New Georgia Project had closed. The voters they registered were still there. The infrastructure that engaged them was not.

The lesson isn’t that institutional coordination fails. The Georgia coalition succeeded spectacularly at what it set out to do. The lesson is that institutional dependency — infrastructure that’s borrowed rather than built, capacity that evaporates when funding or leadership shifts — is fatal to long-term civic presence. Down Home’s model persists because the infrastructure belongs to the counties it serves. Georgia’s produced extraordinary results and left nothing permanent behind.

Your network’s engagement with institutions — whether in a dense urban field or across rural counties — should aim for the former. Build relationships with institutions. Benefit from their resources and knowledge. But ensure that your network’s capacity is yours, not borrowed.

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In the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, June Osborne doesn’t have the luxury of working only with people she trusts. She works with Commander Lawrence — a man who helped design the system that enslaved her — because his resources, his guilt, and his remaining institutional access are useful. She coordinates with Marthas across class boundaries, building an operational network out of people whose positions within Gilead’s hierarchy give them access her position denies. She engages the Mayday resistance without knowing its full structure or fully trusting its leadership.

June’s coalition-building is pragmatic. She doesn’t pretend Lawrence is a genuine ally. She doesn’t confuse the Marthas’ cooperation with ideological alignment. She works with imperfect partners because the mission — getting children out — requires capabilities no single person or group possesses. The moral complexity of that engagement is the point. You can work with institutions whose values don’t perfectly align with yours, whose structures reproduce dynamics you’re working to change, whose leadership may be part of the problem you’re trying to address. The question isn’t whether the partnership is pure. It’s whether it serves the mission while preserving your network’s autonomy.

That’s the landscape question at its sharpest. Know the institutions. Know the law. Know the ground. And know what you’re engaging for, what you’re offering, and what you’re not willing to trade.

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Challenge

Three parts, adapted to your geographic context.

Part 1 — Map your institutional landscape. At a joint meeting, identify the organizations active in your area. For each one:

• Name and function: What does this organization do?
• Constituency: Who does it serve or represent?
• Overlap: Where do its interests intersect with your network’s concerns?
• Engagement history: Has anyone in the network already interacted with it?
• Opportunity: What could a partnership look like?
• Co-optation risk: Where might the channeling, inclusion-without-power, or salience control dynamics apply?

For urban and suburban networks, prioritize — not every institution warrants network-level engagement. Focus on organizations whose work is complementary to your current concerns.

For rural networks, map what exists. A short list isn’t a weak map — it’s an accurate one, and it tells you exactly where your engagement has the most leverage.

Part 2 — Make one institutional contact as a network. Not as individual groups — as a coordinated network. Attend an institutional event together, or invite an institutional representative to a joint meeting, or propose a specific collaboration. The contact should be deliberate: the network has discussed what it wants from the relationship and what it’s offering.

Be transparent about who you are — an informal network of community members working on local concerns. Don’t overstate your capacity. Don’t understate your commitment.

Part 3 — Build your legal awareness file. This can be done concurrently with the institutional mapping:

1. Check the ICNL US Protest Law Tracker for your state’s specific legislation affecting assembly, protest, and civic action.
2. Download and distribute the ACLU Know Your Rights guides to all network members.
3. Identify your nearest NLG chapter and local legal aid organizations. Add their contact information to the network’s shared resources.
4. At a joint meeting, conduct a 30-minute orientation: your right to attend and record public meetings, the basics of your state’s public records law, and when to consult a lawyer.

Document everything. The institutional map, the legal resources, and the notes from your first institutional contact become part of the shared reference material that grows across these chapters.

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Field journal: Record the institutional map, noting which institutions the network has engaged and which remain to be explored. File the legal awareness materials alongside them. And note what the mapping surfaced about your coordination’s durability. Down Home NC persists because its infrastructure belongs to the places it serves. Georgia’s coalition produced extraordinary results and left nothing permanent. Which does your coordination more closely resemble — and what would need to change to ensure that what you’re building belongs to the people who built it? That question, and whatever the institutional mapping turned up about ongoing coordination with existing organizations, connects to the next chapter’s focus on sustaining what you’ve started.

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