What Holds When It's Hard

Something came up during your institutional mapping or your first institutional contact. Maybe it was a pace disagreement — one group wanted to engage a local organization immediately, the other wanted to wait until the network felt more established. Maybe it was a discovery that challenged your assumptions — an institution you expected to be an ally turned out to have interests that conflict with yours, or a relationship that seemed promising produced friction when the actual conversation happened. Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe someone on one group’s spoke just said, at a coordination meeting, “I’m not sure this is worth the effort.”

That’s the question underneath this chapter. Not whether the skills work — you’ve practiced governance, mapped landscapes, coordinated joint actions. The question is whether the overhead of coordination is sustainable. Whether the meetings, the debriefs, the slow consent process, the energy it takes to maintain a relationship between autonomous groups — whether that’s a good use of the limited time and energy your members have.

The documented record answers that honestly: coordination breaks networks. Not opposition. Not infiltration. Not lack of resources. The friction of sustained coordination — the meetings that run long, the disagreements that don’t resolve cleanly, the slow accumulation of exhaustion in the people who carry the coordination load — is what kills most multi-group efforts. The Women’s March mobilized the largest single-day protest in U.S. history and couldn’t sustain its coalition for three years. Sunrise grew from a handful of hubs to over 500 and saw roughly 80% go inactive. These weren’t failures of vision or commitment. They were structural failures — the absence of mechanisms to handle the friction that coordination inevitably produces.

This chapter is about those mechanisms. Conflict resolution between groups, sustainability at network scale, and the structural question of whether your network is ready to grow. The throughline is that friction and burnout are design problems, not motivation problems. The structures that survive them are documented.

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What Breaks Networks

The research on coalition failure converges on a consistent pattern: the conflicts that destroy multi-group coordination are almost never about values. They’re about pace and priority. One group wants to move faster. The other isn’t ready. One group thinks the network should focus on housing. The other thinks school board accountability is more urgent. Both care about civic engagement. Both showed up to coordinate. The disagreement isn’t about why — it’s about how and when.

Inside your group, you learned that conflict is personal and relational. The groan zone. Someone’s feelings are hurt, someone feels unheard, the facilitator guides the group through it using the tools you built — ground rules, the consensus spectrum, NVC “I” statements. Between groups, conflict operates differently. It’s structural. The disagreement isn’t between two people who know each other well. It’s between two groups with different internal cultures, different risk tolerances, different senses of urgency, and different relationships to the community. Your three-step escalation from the coalition agreement — goals versus methods, compatible versus incompatible interests, agree to disagree — handles many of these. But there’s a harder version of the problem: what happens when the escalation itself becomes the friction?

The Women’s March is the sharpest illustration. Four co-chairs held concentrated authority over a coalition of more than 550 partner organizations. When an accountability crisis surfaced — co-chair Tamika Mallory’s association with Louis Farrakhan and the ensuing antisemitism controversy — the coalition had no mechanism to address it. No escalation protocol. No decision domains that separated the co-chairs’ personal conduct from the coalition’s direction. No way for the 550 organizations to force action. Co-founder Teresa Shook had to resort to a Facebook post to call for resignations. By the time three of the four co-chairs departed in September 2019, partner organizations had dropped from 550 to roughly 200. State chapters had dissolved. The coalition that mobilized millions of people couldn’t sustain itself through one unresolved internal conflict.

The lesson isn’t that the underlying disagreement was too hard. It’s that no structure existed to process it. Georgetown historian Michael Kazin identified the deeper problem: every broad progressive coalition he studied that survived was focused on a single issue, creating a basis for unity that the Women’s March’s multi-issue identity couldn’t provide. But single-issue focus isn’t the only solution. The alternative is explicit governance — the tools you already have — applied before the crisis arrives.

Indivisible faced a version of the same challenge and survived it. When local-national tensions surfaced — local groups telling researchers “We don’t get any resources from them. We get demands from them” — the statewide coordination bodies served as a mediating layer. Not controlling local groups, not representing the national organization. Absorbing friction that would otherwise have cascaded directly between local and national, where the power imbalance would have made resolution impossible. The statewide coordinators didn’t resolve the tension. They created a space where it could be named, heard, and addressed incrementally — regular calls, shared working groups, elected representatives from each congressional district. The middle tier made the friction productive rather than destructive.

Your network’s coordination structure — the spokes council, the liaison model, the decision domains — already contains the bones of a mediating structure. The question is whether you have a protocol for when those structures aren’t enough.

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Peer Mediation

When two groups in a network reach an impasse the three-step escalation can’t resolve, a third party can help. Not a judge — a facilitator. Someone from outside the dispute whose role is to help the groups see the disagreement clearly, not to decide who’s right.

If your network has a third group, the mediator comes from there. If not, consider an institutional contact from your landscape mapping — someone both groups trust, who understands your coordination but isn’t part of either group’s internal dynamics. The mediator doesn’t need training in formal conflict resolution. They need the ability to listen without taking sides and to ask the questions the disputing groups have stopped asking each other.

Peer Mediation Protocol

Before the session. The mediator meets briefly with each group separately — fifteen minutes, not an hour. The purpose is to understand each group’s position, their core concern, and what outcome they’d consider acceptable. The mediator is looking for the gap: where does each group think the disagreement lives? Often, the groups have different theories about what they’re actually fighting about. That gap is the mediator’s starting point.

Opening. All parties together. The mediator sets three ground rules: each group speaks through one representative (their spoke or someone they designate), the representative describes their group’s position and concern without characterizing the other group’s motives, and no one interrupts. The mediator restates each position to confirm understanding before moving forward.

The diagnostic question. The mediator asks: is this disagreement about goals, methods, pace, or something else? The groups may disagree even about this — one group thinks it’s about pace, the other thinks it’s about values. The mediator’s job is to surface that secondary disagreement, because it’s often the real one. A conflict that looks like it’s about whether to engage with the school board might actually be about how much public visibility the network can tolerate. A conflict about pace might actually be about capacity — one group has more bandwidth than the other and interprets caution as reluctance.

The resolution spectrum. Not every disagreement needs resolution. The mediator helps the groups identify where this one falls: Does it require a shared decision? (If so, return to the consent process with the mediator facilitating.) Can the groups pursue different approaches simultaneously without conflict? (If so, name the boundary and document it.) Is this a disagreement the network needs to hold as productive tension — an ongoing difference in perspective that informs rather than obstructs? (If so, name it explicitly. Unnamed tension becomes resentment. Named tension becomes awareness.)

Closing. The mediator summarizes what was clarified, what was decided, and what remains unresolved. Both groups confirm the summary is accurate. The outcome is documented in the field journal — not as a verdict, but as a record of what the network learned about itself.

The protocol is deliberately low-ceremony. Thirty minutes to an hour. No formal training required. The mediator’s authority comes from their position outside the dispute, not from expertise. The practice of mediation — even when no real conflict exists — builds the muscle the network will need when a real one arrives. That’s why the challenge includes a simulation even if your coordination is currently smooth. It won’t always be.

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What Sustains Networks

The documented record on network failure converges on a single finding: burnout is the most common cause. Not opposition. Not disagreement. Exhaustion. And the research is equally clear that burnout is structural, not personal. When someone burns out, examine the structure, not the person.

The COVID-era mutual aid research documented the pattern precisely: a 75% activity drop within three months of formation in most volunteer networks. Not because volunteers stopped caring. Because the infrastructure couldn’t support sustained effort — unclear expectations, invisible workload distribution, no rotation of high-burden roles, and no distinction between the pace that gets something launched and the pace that keeps it running.

Your network faces this at a different scale. The coordination overhead — spokes council meetings, liaison communication, joint actions, institutional engagement — sits on top of everything your groups are already doing internally. If the coordination burden falls disproportionately on a few people, those people will burn out. And when they do, the network loses not just their energy but the institutional knowledge they carry — the relationships, the context, the understanding of how the coordination actually works.

The structural interventions are documented. None of them are complicated. All of them require deliberate implementation.

Rotating coordination roles with explicit descriptions and term limits. You’re already rotating the spoke role. Extend the principle to every coordination function — whoever facilitates spokes council meetings, whoever maintains the liaison channel, whoever tracks the coalition agreement and the decision domain map. Write the role descriptions. Set the rotation schedule. Monthly or quarterly, depending on the role’s weight. When someone steps out of a role, they brief their successor. The rotation ensures no one becomes indispensable, and the briefing ensures continuity.

Regular workload check-ins. Not “how are you feeling?” — that’s a personal question and gets personal answers. “How many hours did coordination take this month? How does that compare to what you expected? Is the distribution across your group roughly even?” The questions are structural and the answers are actionable. If one person is carrying twice the coordination burden, that’s a design problem with a design solution: redistribute, simplify, or pause something.

The crisis-pace / sustaining-pace distinction. Some periods require intensity — a joint action is approaching, an institutional relationship needs immediate attention, an external event demands rapid coordination. That’s crisis pace, and it works for weeks, not months. Sustaining pace is the baseline — the coordination rhythm the network can maintain indefinitely without anyone’s other commitments suffering. The network needs to know which pace it’s operating at, name it explicitly, and switch deliberately. The dangerous pattern is crisis pace that never ends — the initial energy of coordination masking an unsustainable rhythm until people start disappearing without explanation.

Explicit permission to rest. This sounds simple. It’s structural. adrienne maree brown’s formulation is that rest isn’t a reward for work — it’s a condition for sustained capacity. For your network, this means: it is acceptable for a group to reduce its coordination participation for a period. It is acceptable for a spoke to say “my group needs a quieter month.” The network absorbs this without treating it as abandonment. Build this expectation into the coalition agreement. Name it before anyone needs it.

Network Health Check

At your next joint meeting — and at regular intervals afterward — run a structured assessment. Not a survey. A facilitated conversation, thirty minutes, with these questions:

How is the coordination workload distributed across groups? Within each group, who carries the coordination burden? Is anyone doing more than they committed to? Are the rotating roles actually rotating, or has rotation stalled?

What pace are we operating at — crisis or sustaining? Is that pace deliberate, or did we drift into it? If crisis pace: what’s the timeline for returning to sustaining pace? If sustaining pace: is it actually sustainable, or are people white-knuckling it?

What’s working in the coordination that we should keep doing? What’s creating friction that we should redesign? What should we stop doing entirely?

Is anyone close to stepping back? Not as a guilt question — as a planning question. If the answer is yes, what would make continuation possible? If the answer is still yes, how does the network absorb that transition?

Document the answers. Compare them to the previous health check. The trend matters more than any single data point. A network where workload distribution is improving and pace is stabilizing is healthy regardless of where it started. A network where the same person has been the primary coordinator for three consecutive health checks has a single point of failure that needs addressing.

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What Changes at Three Groups

Some networks, by this point, will have connected with a third group. Others won’t — and that’s not a failure. Your network’s pace is determined by the relationships available and the coordination capacity you’ve built, not by a curriculum’s timeline.

But the research shows something worth naming about what changes structurally when a third group joins. It’s not just “more people.” It’s a qualitative shift in the network’s properties.

At two groups, every relationship is bilateral. If the relationship between your groups deteriorates, the network is over. There’s no redundancy, no alternative pathway, no one to mediate. The network is the relationship, and the relationship is the network.

At three groups, triangulation becomes possible. If Group A and Group B disagree, Group C can mediate — not because C has authority, but because C has relationships with both and a perspective outside the dispute. That’s the peer mediation protocol above, made possible by structure rather than improvisation. If one group needs to step back for a month, the other two continue coordinating. The network survives the absence of any single group. Distributed specialization becomes possible — different groups develop different strengths, and the network can deploy the right group for the right task.

Network science calls this triadic closure. The practical implication is simpler: a three-group network is qualitatively more resilient than a two-group coordination. Two is a partnership. Three is a network.

If your network is ready, the first-contact protocol from the opening fieldbook chapter still applies. Behavioral recognition. Observation before approach. Graduated trust. The boundary-spanner role you developed — someone with connections in multiple spaces — is your bridge. The spokes council expands by one seat. The coalition agreement and decision domains get renegotiated to include the new group’s perspective. The governance structures you’ve built are designed for this — consent-based, adaptable, documented.

If your network isn’t ready, that’s the right answer. A two-group coordination that’s sustainable and healthy is more durable than a three-group network that’s overstretched. Deepen the institutional relationships from the last chapter instead. Growth is not the only measure of progress.

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The Sunrise Movement illustrates what happens when growth outpaces governance. Founded in 2017, the organization grew from a handful of local hubs to over 500 in four years, put the Green New Deal on the national agenda, and staged actions that redefined climate politics. It also nearly destroyed itself.

The most revealing account comes from co-founders William Lawrence and Dyanna Jaye, who published a three-part self-reflection in Convergence Magazine in 2022. Their central admission: the founding team created a centralized nonprofit serving as a command center while telling hubs they were “fully autonomous.” Lawrence and Jaye wrote that this was technically true — hubs could organize however they wanted, choose their own actions, set their own priorities. But it contained what they called “a lie of omission.” Fundraising, press, and strategy were controlled by a centralized leadership of about ten people, including seven co-founders. And because, as they wrote, left activists are suspicious of hierarchy, the leadership worried their centralized body wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny — so they just didn’t talk about it much.

The contradiction built pressure through several phases. A fellowship program placed over 70 young organizers on minimal stipends across five swing states, creating class tensions with salaried staff. The staff expanded from a dozen in 2018 to over 50 in 2019 and over 100 in 2020, and adopted corporate management techniques that shifted the internal culture. Hub leaders increasingly demanded transparency and democratic governance. The gap between the stated structure and the actual structure widened until it became undeniable.

By late 2023, the decline was dramatic. A democratization vote in July 2022 drew only about 700 votes nationally — from a movement that once had a universe of 80,000 supporters. Active hubs had dropped to fewer than 100 from a peak above 500. The organization that transformed climate politics couldn’t sustain its own internal coordination.

I’m including this case at length not because Sunrise failed where others succeeded — every organization in these notes’ case studies struggled with similar tensions. I’m including it because the founders named the failure with extraordinary honesty, and their diagnosis is the one that matters most for your network. Hidden hierarchy isn’t a moral failure. It’s a structural risk that any coordination faces, including yours. The moment one person or one group is doing more coordinating than others without that imbalance being visible and rotatable, you’re building the same contradiction Sunrise built. Not out of bad faith. Out of convenience, urgency, and the natural tendency for capable people to take on more than their share.

Lawrence and Jaye’s conclusion is worth carrying forward: movements need democratic governance with representative leadership, open strategic dialogue, and equal standing of all members. That’s a description of what the spokes council, the decision domains, and the coalition agreement are designed to provide. The structures aren’t bureaucracy. They’re the immune system.

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In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts governed by a single principle: agreement or execution. “Off with their heads!” for any disagreement, any question, any challenge to the Queen’s authority. Her court followed rules — elaborate, arbitrary, changeable rules — but the rules existed to serve the Queen’s power, not to govern fairly. The croquet game had rules that changed whenever Alice was winning. The trial had procedures that existed to produce a predetermined verdict.

Alice’s intervention was simpler than rebellion. She asked questions. “Why?” and “Who cares?” and, finally, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards.” The governance that couldn’t tolerate questioning collapsed the moment someone questioned it. The governance that survives — consent-based, transparent, accountable — is the kind that welcomes the questions. Not because questioning is comfortable, but because governance that can’t handle questioning isn’t governance. It’s control.

Your network’s coordination structures are designed to be questioned. The health check is a questioning mechanism. The mediation protocol exists because disagreements deserve structured attention, not suppression. The rotating roles ensure that no one holds enough accumulated authority to avoid accountability. The coalition agreement is revisable by consent — it changes when the network’s reality changes. The structures hold not because they’re rigid but because they’re honest.

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Challenge

Three components, adapted to where your network is.

Part 1 — Conduct a network health check. At a joint meeting, run the structured assessment described above. How is the coordination workload distributed? What pace are you operating at? What’s working and what isn’t? Is anyone close to stepping back, and what would the network need to absorb that transition? Document the results and compare them to any previous assessments. If this is your first health check, establish the baseline.

Part 2 — Practice the peer mediation protocol. Even if no real conflict exists, run a simulation. Pick a plausible scenario — the groups disagree about the pace of growth, or about whether to engage with a specific institution, or about how public to be about the network’s existence. If you have a third group, designate a mediator from that group. If not, ask a trusted institutional contact or run the exercise with someone from one group mediating a hypothetical dispute between the other group’s representatives. Walk through the full protocol: separate preparation, opening statements, diagnostic question, resolution spectrum, documented outcome. The practice builds the muscle before it’s needed.

Part 3 — If ready, explore a third-group connection. Using the behavioral recognition and first-contact protocol from Chapter 27. The boundary-spanner role applies — someone with connections in spaces where other organized groups might be found. If a third group isn’t available or your network isn’t ready, deepen existing institutional connections instead. Use the institutional map from the last chapter to identify one relationship worth developing further. Growth and depth are both progress.

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Field journal: Record the health check results — workload distribution, current pace, what’s working, what needs redesign. Note the mediation simulation outcome: what felt natural, what felt forced, what would you do differently in a real dispute? If you made contact with a potential third group, record the observation notes using the same format as Chapter 27’s first-contact protocol. And note what surfaced during the health check or the mediation practice that surprised you — a capability you didn’t know the network had, a vulnerability you hadn’t named, a pattern that only becomes visible when you look at the coordination as a whole rather than from inside any single group. That observation — what the network can do that none of its groups can do alone — connects to what comes next.

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