(Illustration by Harry Campbell)
In July 2022, Causa—one of Oregon’s leading immigrant-rights organizations—announced its closure. In its 27 years, it enjoyed historic wins that I followed closely as a Portland-based community organizer. It won driver’s licenses for undocumented Oregonians. It defeated a ballot measure that would have gutted the state’s sanctuary law. It co-led the distribution of $60 million in emergency aid to immigrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In its closure announcement, the organization’s board cited fundraising difficulties, staff and leadership turnover, and an unresolved labor dispute. Causa suffered years of internal strife and replaced three executive directors in as many years. To many of us close to the work, the news was surprising, but the deeper story was familiar: The mission did not fail; internal relationships had.
Stories about organizational meltdowns and strife between erstwhile allies are increasingly prevalent. Conflict within organizations, between coalitions, across movements is a recurring theme, threatening movement power, community trust, and the well-being of staff and leaders. As community organizer Vanessa Priya Daniel describes in her 2025 book Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning, even the most visionary organizations can crumble under the weight of internal conflict.
The nonprofit sector has fundamentally misunderstood the issue. Conflict is not evidence that organizations are failing. It is evidence that they are attempting difficult democratic work. The real failure is not the existence of conflict. It is the lack of preparation for conflict when it inevitably occurs.
To ensure that nonprofit organizations survive conflict and emerge stronger, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector must stop treating conflict as dysfunction to avoid and instead embrace conflict resiliency as a strategic opportunity to build. We are dealing with a systemic failure caused by lack of dedicated infrastructure and collective investment.
Misdiagnosing Conflict
I have seen mistaken responses to conflict over nearly two decades of nonprofit and government leadership, including service as an executive director and board member. When conflict erupts, we rush to label it a failure of leadership, culture, or character. In reality, most conflict is a predictable human response to stress and difference.
Neuroscience helps explain why. Disagreement activates our brain’s threat response, flooding our system with cortisol and adrenaline. Clear thinking narrows; we default to acute stress responses. A colleague who freezes may be perceived as disengaged. One who snaps may be branded unprofessional. Left unacknowledged, these stress responses erode trust and drain energy from mission-critical work.
Avoidance makes it worse. Without safe ways to surface tensions, conflict festers until it explodes. The fallout is predictable: staff departures, reputational harm, coalition fractures, even organizational collapse.
We have systems for learning from program missteps—evaluations, audits, after-action reviews. However, conflict is not a bug to fix; it is the natural by-product of doing hard, collaborative work. Whether the outcome is generative or destructive depends on how we handle it.
Other sectors understand this. Aviation does not assume every flight will be smooth. It invests in resilience engineering: crew drills, standardized checklists, black box reviews, and cross-company protocols. The premise is that people under stress default to their training.
By contrast, the social sector often tiptoes around conflict, hoping it won’t happen. We diversify our teams—by race, role, experience—but neglect to prepare for the friction that difference can generate. To be clear, we want this friction: It is the raw material of better decisions and deeper alignment—if we are equipped to work through it. Instead of supporting active conflict engagement, we often discourage it. As conflict experts Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith write, “Peace without justice soon becomes oppressive … superficial settlements often lead to silence, distrust, and renewed hostilities.”
An organization that has never discussed how to handle disagreements is like a flight crew that has never trained for emergencies. The response will be clumsy at best, disastrous at worst. What’s more, staff often leave after such conflicts, only to join another nonprofit with the same gaps. Without sector-level training and norms, the cycle continues.
Building resilience requires preparation and training, not endurance. The goal is not to suppress or avoid conflict, but rather to prepare organizations—and the workforce itself—to navigate it constructively.
Conflict Resilience
Conflict resilience is the capacity to engage disagreement directly, learn from it, and strengthen relationships in the process. Psychologist Ruth Díaz draws a key distinction here: Conflict resolution seeks to end a dispute; conflict resilience builds the conditions and relationships to prevent it from becoming destructive. Resolution is episodic. Resilience is systemic.
Resilient culture expects and prepares for conflict. “Communities steeped in resiliency principles are characterized by members who are equipped to engage in self-reflection, understand the impact of their actions, and work collaboratively toward resolution,” Díaz writes. “Such communities are not only better equipped to handle conflicts, but also to emerge stronger and more unified from them.”
Over time, I have seen a small set of organizational practices consistently strengthen conflict resiliency.
First, normalize conflict. Make it clear during onboarding and team meetings that disagreement is expected (not a problem to suppress). In diverse, mission-driven settings, treat friction as a feature instead of a flaw.
Second, establish clear protocols. When tensions arise, staff need to know what to do and in what order: direct dialogue, facilitated conversations, access to an ombudsperson, escalation when necessary, and so on. Knowing what to do builds confidence in team members, and knowing how conflict will be successfully addressed builds trust across the team.
Third, invest in training. Equip teams with communication, feedback, and de-escalation skills early, and retrain often.
Fourth, build early-warning systems. Pulse surveys, skip-level check-ins, and informal spaces can help surface brewing tensions. Psychological safety depends on knowing that concerns will not be buried.
Finally, treat conflict as a source of learning. After a difficult moment, hold postmortems and resist casting blame. The issue is not who failed, but what the organization can learn and do differently next time.
Together, these practices strengthen individual organizations. But however necessary, they remain insufficient: Even if every nonprofit adopted them, the sector would still face a structural gap without shared infrastructure.
Building Collective Infrastructure
The deeper opportunity for conflict resilience lies at the sector level. Conflict thrives in isolation; resilience grows through shared systems.
Shared resilience infrastructure is efficient. Many nonprofits are already exploring mergers or forming collaboratives to survive financial pressures. Shared conflict infrastructure follows this same logic: It spreads cost, reduces duplication, and gives organizations access to professional support they could not afford alone.
We have seen this approach work in other fields. The aviation industry trains pilots with a shared crisis protocol. Hospitals conduct mortality reviews to improve systems. Philanthropy routinely underwrites shared services in finance, HR, and technology. Conflict infrastructure can follow the same path.
The infrastructure could take many forms, depending on context and capacity: regional pools of ombuds and facilitators, sector-wide training standards, learning reviews and anonymized case studies. The specific design matters less than the core need, which is for conflict resilience to be treated as shared infrastructure rather than each organization’s private problem.
Philanthropy can play a catalytic role here. Today, funders often misread grantee silence as stability and the presentation of conflict as a red flag. However, if grant makers were to treat conflict resiliency as legitimate infrastructure—the way they treat technology upgrades and strategy development—they could normalize and scale resilience practices across the field.
An infrastructure approach is also equitable. For communities long marginalized, individualistic models of conflict management often echo the very power dynamics that nonprofit organizations seek to dismantle. A shared model opens the door to collective, relational approaches, such as community-based mediation traditions or Indigenous practices of accountability and repair. By embracing solidarity, the sector can align conflict resilience with cultural traditions that center collectivism, interdependence, and shared wisdom.
Philanthropy has a choice: Reinforce the culture of silence around conflict, or resource the capacity to handle it well.
The logic follows proven models in transportation, healthcare, and philanthropy’s own investments in shared tech, back-office support, and political capacity-building. The Northwest Health Foundation’s Civic Health Initiative, which invests in collective power-building among BIPOC organizations in Oregon and Southwest Washington, offers a shining example in its emphasis on shared infrastructure and a healthy and effective ecosystem.
Conflict resiliency is a prerequisite for impact. A brilliant strategy is meaningless if a team implementing it collapses under tension.
Yes, conflict resilience will not prevent every loss. But it gives organizations a fighting chance to stay in relationship, stay accountable, and stay in the work. Philanthropy has both the tools and the responsibility to help build it.
At its core, conflict resilience is about integrity. Nonprofit organizations, and especially those with justice-centered missions, cannot credibly fight for fairness externally while defaulting to silence or harm internally. By resourcing conflict resilience, philanthropy helps ensure that equity, transparency, and accountability are not simply values on paper, but real-life practices.
Read more stories by Ana del Rocío.