Where I Learned to Watch the Room

I was recently asked to describe my equity values for a consultant directory. It's the kind of question that invites boilerplate — a paragraph about inclusion that could belong to anyone. I sat with it longer than I expected to, because the honest answer isn't a policy. It's a place.

I grew up in South Africa as a coloured woman. That's not a typo — in South Africa, "coloured" names a distinct community with its own history and culture, and it was also a legal category under apartheid. Which means I know, in a way that isn't theoretical, what it looks like when a system formally decides whose voice counts, whose opportunities are open, and whose are not. The people with the most at stake in those decisions had the least room to speak into them.

I didn't set out to build a consulting practice around that experience. But when I look at the work I care most about, it's there.

Strategic planning is, at its core, a series of conversations about the future. And in every one of those conversations, there is power in the room — a founder whose vision built the place, a board chair who's held the gavel for a decade, a funder whose priorities everyone quietly tracks. There are also the people whose futures are most affected and whose voices carry the least structural weight: junior staff, quiet board members, the communities the organization exists to serve.

One engagement stays with me. During succession planning for a nonprofit client, the presumed successor was the founder's daughter. On paper, she was central to every conversation. In practice, she had the least freedom of anyone in the room to speak honestly about her own future — anything she said could be read as ambition or as rejection of her father. So we designed the process to change that. She advocated for herself, in her own words, rather than having her path decided around her.

That, to me, is what equity looks like in facilitation. Not a statement on a website. A design choice, made deliberately, so that outcomes aren't pre-determined by who holds power.

I'll also say plainly what I told the directory: I hold this as ongoing work, not a finished credential. Lived experience gives me a starting point, not all the answers. I learn from peer communities of consultants, from the organizations I serve, and from honest reflection on where my own perspective has limits. The consultants most worth trusting on equity, I think, are the ones still doing the work on themselves.

I intend to stay one of them.

Ilse Bovard is the founder of Bovard Consulting, a Pittsburgh-based practice supporting nonprofits with strategic planning, board governance, and facilitation.