How We Work and What You’re Investing In
IWC does not price by the day. The investment for each engagement reflects the outcome the organisation needs, the risk that a poor process would carry, and the breadth of capability being accessed.
That capability combines governance expertise and intersectional EDI practice, board-level lived experience, an active women’s sector network, and the delivery discipline to bring complex, multi-stakeholder work in on time and to budget.
It also includes a level of technical literacy that is rare in governance and EDI consultancy: working knowledge of accessibility standards including WCAG compliance, accessible document and content formats, and the digital inclusion considerations that determine whether an organisation’s communications actually reach the people it exists to serve. This extends to the governance and legal implications of AI use and data handling under UK GDPR, risks that are present in most organisations and named in very few.
When you commission IWC, these are not additional services. They are part of how every engagement is designed and delivered.
About our Specialisms
Why training alone won’t shift the structure
Most diversity, equity and inclusion training focuses on individual awareness: bias, difference, legal obligation. That work has its place. IWC works at a different level entirely: the structural and organisational conditions that determine whether inclusion is possible in the first place, regardless of individual intent.
A board can be full of people who have completed unconscious bias training and still consistently make decisions that marginalise the communities it serves, if the way decisions are structured, who is invited into which conversations, and whose lived experience is treated as relevant expertise has not been examined. That examination is what IWC specialises in.
Lived experience as governance design
Centring lived experience means designing your governance and decision-making so that the knowledge and perspective of people directly affected by your work has genuine weight in shaping it, not as a gesture of inclusion but as a structural reality.
In practice, this looks different for every organisation. For some, it means reviewing board composition and recruitment. For others, it means redesigning how staff with lived experience of the issues are involved in strategic conversations. For funders, it often means examining how grant-making criteria and application processes either reproduce or challenge existing power dynamics.
Shifting Power in grant-making and commissioning
Shifting Power challenges grant-makers and commissioners to redistribute decision-making authority toward the communities and organisations closest to the issues being funded. In practice, it means examining who decides funding priorities, who assesses applications, what counts as evidence of impact, and whether the organisations you fund have genuine agency over how resources are used.
For funders in the women’s sector, this has particular urgency. Many of the organisations best placed to address the issues you care about are led by and accountable to the women most directly affected by inequality and harm. The governance decisions funders make about how they allocate authority and resources directly shape whether those organisations can do their most effective work, or whether they spend their capacity managing funder relationships and reporting requirements instead.
Who Leads This Work?
All IWC organisational work is led by Anj Handa, Forbes-recognised Diversity and Inclusion Trailblazer and governance specialist with almost 20 years of experience in equality, employment policy and structural change.
As one of fewer than 1% of Black and brown women in the UK holding governance roles at senior level, including as Chair of arts organisation Freedom Studios and Independent Governor and Committee Chair at Leeds Arts University, Anj brings both the expertise and the lived authority this work requires.
Where a programme or project benefits from additional specialist input, Anj draws on a trusted network of associates in areas including media handling, public speaking coaching and facilitation.
Listen to Anj’s recent interview with Third Sector.
Working with Us
IWC works only with organisations that are ready to examine the consequences of their governance and leadership practices, not just their intentions. Every engagement is scoped individually. The investment reflects the outcome you need, the complexity of what you’re addressing, and the risk of getting it wrong.
Before any proposal is developed, we take time to understand what you’re working on, what feels unresolved, and whether IWC is genuinely the right fit. If we are not, we will say so and, where we can, suggest who might be.
To start that conversation, get in touch to book a no-obligation call.
Not ready to commission yet? I write about governance, power and structural change in the women’s sector on Power and Practice on Substack. It’s where most client relationships begin.
