The Steering Council is where the project's legitimacy tension is most acute: it needs enough institutional credibility to hold funder relationships and public trust, while remaining genuinely accountable to the deliberative process rather than to the interests that typically dominate civic institutions. Its membership reflects that tension directly. Some members bring the organizational experience, legal knowledge, or philanthropic relationships that an institution of this scale requires. Others are rotating PALC representatives who carry working group voices into governance — people who arrived in the project as civic participants and earned their way to this level through the quality of their deliberative contribution. The project's anti-capture architecture ensures that neither group can dominate.

Integration Teams are the most cognitively demanding layer in the project — requiring the ability to hold the analytical findings of multiple domains simultaneously and identify the connections between them that no single domain working group can see. Systems Integration Fellows are a defined professional role, selected for this specific capacity. Some come from academic backgrounds in systems thinking, complexity science, or interdisciplinary research. Others develop this capacity through the project itself — participants whose deliberative work across multiple domains has given them a facility with cross-domain analysis that no formal training produced. The project resists the assumption that this work belongs only to credentialed generalists.

PALCs are where the anti-stratification commitment is most consequential. The people who have lived most directly inside the systems each domain examines — who understand from experience what the evidence base misses — must be at this level, not only at Level 1. A PALC member in the Housing domain might be a formerly homeless person who has spent years navigating shelter systems and knows their internal logic better than any researcher. A PALC member in the Carceral System domain might be someone who has experienced incarceration and has since built an analytical framework around that experience that no criminologist holds. These people sit alongside others with domain knowledge developed through professional experience — a public defender, a housing policy researcher, a community organizer — and the PALC functions because all of their knowledge is needed.

SAWN participants include civic participants who have moved deeper into the work — people whose three-to-six month Level 1 engagement gave them analytical grounding that they are now developing into something more sustained. Some had relevant domain knowledge when they arrived; others developed it through the deliberative process itself. A retired nurse who arrived as a civic participant in the Health domain and whose understanding of how healthcare actually functions at the point of delivery is more analytically sophisticated than most researchers' models. A formerly incarcerated person in the Carceral System domain who has spent two years developing a structural analysis of what incarceration does and does not accomplish. Micro Task Units at this level also draw on people with specific technical skills — data analysis, legal research, policy drafting — who work in service of the SAWN's analytical agenda.

This is the level where the project's equity commitments are most directly tested. The employment model exists specifically to make this room possible: to ensure that the people who most need to be here — who have the most direct experience of failing systems and the least economic flexibility to participate in civic processes — can actually be here. A construction foreman who watched his kids priced out of the county where they grew up. A teacher commuting ninety minutes each way because she can't afford to live in the district where she works. A formerly incarcerated person rebuilding a life. A farmworker. A person who has navigated the shelter system. An undocumented immigrant. A young person carrying student debt into a housing market that wasn't designed for them. These are not edge cases to be accommodated — they are the people whose presence gives the project its analytical depth and its democratic legitimacy.