What If We Asked Differently?

A letter to the government clients I’ve never quite known how to talk to

Here’s something we don’t talk about in equity consulting: sometimes the people who hire us are as trapped by the system as the communities we’re trying to reach.

We show up armed with methodologies, timelines, deliverables. We bring race equity frameworks, trauma-informed practice, community accountability. And then we bump into something we didn’t expect. Not resistance to equity — but exhaustion. Not bad faith — but bureaucratic habits so deeply embedded they feel like gravity.

The project manager who requests daily updates isn’t necessarily distrusting us. He might be protecting himself in a culture where “managing tightly” is the only visible proof of competence.

The director who insists on approving every slide deck isn’t necessarily controlling. She might be terrified. Of ministers. Of media. Of being the person who got this wrong.

We name these dynamics “white supremacist culture” in our frameworks, and that naming is true. Urgency. Paternalism. Perfectionism. Fear of failure. Yes — this is the operational DNA of colonial institutions. But when we only name them as oppression, we miss something: these are also survival strategies.

I’ve been thinking about the invitation we don’t make.

We don’t say: I see how hard you’re working to hold this together. I see that you’re navigating pressures I’ll never fully understand. I see that the system that harms communities also harms the people tasked with serving them.

We don’t say: What if we paused the machinery for an hour and just talked about what this feels like from where you sit?

We don’t ask: What would make this collaboration feel sustainable — not just defensible?

Because we’re afraid. That empathy will be mistaken for weakness. That naming their constraints will be heard as excusing harm. That proximity to power corrupts, so we hold power at arm’s length.

But what if proximity to power is also the only way to shift it?

We are trying something different in our next government check-in. We are going to ask:

What’s the hardest part of this project — from where you sit?

Not the hardest logistically. The hardest emotionally. What keeps you up? What are you most worried about getting wrong?

And then: What would make this collaboration feel like support — instead of another thing to manage?

Not because their comfort matters more than community accountability. Because people who feel seen can sometimes risk seeing others. Because shame is the enemy of learning. Because transformation moves at the speed of trust — and trust requires the courage to ask what someone actually needs, not just what we assume they deserve.

To our fellow consultants:

We have gotten good at diagnosing institutions. We are less practiced at approaching the people inside them with genuine curiosity — rather than pre-formed analysis.

This isn’t about letting anyone off the hook. It’s about recognizing that the hook itself is part of what we’re here to transform.

The work is not the deliverable. The work is the relationship.

And relationships require practice — not just principles. That’s why we have built Auntea-Ology and a course on Navigating Conflict: spaces to sit with the questions this piece only gestures at. To practice staying in relationship through the hard stuff, rather than retreating from it.

An invitation:

If any of this resonates — if you’ve felt the tension between what equity work promises and how it actually unfolds — you might find space for it in our two current offerings:

Auntea-Ology is a series of live, confidential dialogues about colonialism, power, and the kind of knowing that does not arrive through a framework or a slide deck. It’s not training. It’s a container — for the questions we don’t get to ask in project meetings.

And Navigating Conflict is a course we have developed for people who work in and alongside systems — consultants, organizers, managers, public servants — who want to stay in relationship through hard conversations rather than retreating from them.

If either of those calls to you, we’d love to have you: www.seedroom.ca / info@seedroom.ca