By Toni P. Lyubenova
I have sat in a lot of difficult rooms.
Rooms where team members stopped speaking to each other three days into a project. Rooms where a coordinator was crying in the bathroom between sessions because she felt invisible to her own team. Rooms where the agenda said “planning” but what was actually happening was a slow burn of energy and unsaid needs.
I’ve also been in rooms where I wish I had spoken sooner. Where I had the tools to say something and lead towards change.
As of now, I am a qualified mediator with the International Mediation Institute. I am also an NVC practitioner, a facilitator, and someone who has spent the last couple of years working in and alongside NGOs across Europe. And I want to say something that the sector doesn’t say often enough:
We are very good at talking about conflict resolution. We are not very good at doing it.
The NGO conflict paradox
Organisations that work on social issues, experiential learning, human rights, social inclusion, peacebuilding, and community empowerment – organisations whose entire reason for existing is to make the world more just and humane – are often places where internal conflict goes unnamed, unaddressed, and eventually destructive.
NGOs run on mission and values. That’s their fuel. But it also means that disagreements don’t feel like disagreements – they feel like betrayals. When you and your colleague both care deeply about the same cause, it becomes very hard to separate “I think we should approach this differently” from “you are not committed to the mission.” The stakes feel existential because the work feels existential.
Add to that the pressure of grant writing, the difficulties of funding, the overwork that is treated as “devotion”, the flat hierarchies that are actually not flat – and you have a sector that is structurally primed for conflict and culturally primed to avoid it.
What NVC taught me about NGO conflict
Nonviolent Communication, developed by Marshall Rosenberg, starts from a deceptively simple premise: beneath every conflict is an unmet need. Not a wrong person. Not a bad intention. A need that isn’t being met, and a strategy – often a clumsy one – to meet it.
I have found this framework more useful in NGO contexts than almost anywhere else, precisely because of the mission-driven dynamic I described above. When someone in an NGO says “you’re not committed to the work” what they often mean is:
I need to know this work matters to you the way it matters to me. I need to feel we’re in this together.
The accusation is a tragic expression, as Rosenberg calls it, of a need for solidarity.
When someone micromanages every detail of a project, they might be expressing:
I need to feel safe. I need to trust that this will be done well. I am afraid of failure and I don’t have another way to manage that fear right now.
This doesn’t mean the behavior is acceptable. It means the path through it is different from what most conflict resolution attempts try to do. You cannot argue someone out of a need. You can only help them find a better strategy to meet it – ideally one that doesn’t cost someone else their dignity.
What mediation actually looks like in this sector
I want to be concrete, because “mediation” sounds formal and institutional in a way that doesn’t match how conflict actually shows up in NGO life.
It shows up as the email that never got answered. The meeting where one person speaks for forty minutes and another person says nothing. The partner organisation that starts copying everyone on everything because trust has broken down. The team member who goes quiet. The co-founder dynamic that has turned into something nobody wants to name.
Mediation in this context is a structured conversation in which someone supports each party to feel genuinely heard before any problem-solving begins.
That last part matters a lot. In my experience, most NGO conflicts that escalate do so not because the problem was unsolvable, but because at least one person in the room never felt that their reality was fully acknowledged. They were offered solutions before they were offered understanding. And so the solutions didn’t land – because the person receiving them was still in the emotional state of someone who hadn’t been heard.
NVC calls this “protective use of force” – when someone shuts down, escalates, or becomes rigid, it is usually because they are protecting something. Often something legitimate. The mediator’s job is to make it safe enough for that protection to soften.
The specific textures of NGO conflict
After working across more than thirty countries, I have noticed some patterns particular to this sector.
The partnership conflict. Erasmus+ and other EU-funded projects bring together organisations from different countries, cultures, and working styles, give them a shared budget and a shared deadline, and expect them to collaborate. The structural conditions for misunderstanding are enormous. I have seen partnerships fracture over something as concrete as who books the venue and something as intangible as whose methodology got centered in the final report.
The volunteer-staff boundary. Many NGOs run on a mix of paid staff and volunteers, and the power dynamics this creates are rarely made explicit. Volunteers feel they can’t raise concerns because they’re “just volunteers.” Staff feel they can’t hold volunteers accountable because “you can’t treat a volunteer like an employee.” The result is resentment on both sides and a gap where accountability should be.
The founder identity. When the person who started an organisation is still running it, their identity and the organisation’s identity are often fused in ways that make feedback feel like personal attack. Believe me, I have been there myself and it’s quite terrifying. Mediating in this context requires particular care – not because founders are wrong, but because they are often carrying grief, fear of irrelevance, and enormous unacknowledged labor that needs to be witnessed before anything else can move.
The values conflict. Perhaps the hardest. When two people genuinely disagree about what the organisation should stand for – which communities to prioritise, which methods are ethical, what success looks like – mediation can clarify the disagreement but cannot resolve it. Sometimes the honest outcome of a mediation process is that two people or two organisations are not, in fact, aligned. That is a legitimate and important thing to know.
What I wish more NGOs would do
Name conflict earlier. The earlier a tension is named, the smaller it still is. Most of the difficult rooms I’ve sat in contained conflicts that had been visible for months before anyone said anything out loud.
Distinguish between positions and needs. A position is what someone says they want. A need is why they want it. In almost every conflict I have mediated, the positions were incompatible and the needs were not. This is the space where resolution lives.
Stop avoiding conflict. Conflict is information. It tells you where values are unclear, where roles are ambiguous, where someone’s contribution has gone unseen. An organisation where no conflict ever surfaces is not a healthy organisation – it is one where conflict has gone underground.
A word about my own practice
I came to mediation through nonviolent communication and through theatre. Specifically through Legislative Theatre and the work of Augusto Boal, whose methods are built on the idea that you can rehearse different responses to oppression – that the stage is a space to practice what hasn’t been possible in real life.
What I found was that the skills were the same. Deep listening. The ability to stay present with someone’s distress without trying to fix it immediately. The capacity to hold multiple realities at once without collapsing them into a verdict.
NVC gave me a language for what was already happening in the room. Mediation training gave me a structure. The theatre gave me a body – a way of understanding that conflict is not just cognitive. It lives in posture, in silence, in who moves toward whom and who moves away.
I bring all of this when I work with NGOs in conflict. Not as a set of techniques to apply, but as a way of being present with what is actually happening – which is almost always more human, more complicated, and more resolvable than it looks from the outside.
If your organisation is navigating something difficult – a partnership under strain, a team dynamic that has stopped working, a transition that is bringing up more than expected – I am available for mediation and facilitation support.
It doesn’t have to be a crisis to be worth addressing.
Toni P.L Lyubenova is a qualified mediator, NVC practitioner, founder of Axolotl and co-founder of Creatosphere. She works with NGOs, Erasmus+ partnerships, and civil society organisations across Europe.
→ axolotl.management@gmail.com