Being Bonterra: Jayke Bouche on building inclusive systems 

Jayke Bouche joined NGP VAN almost four years ago, after a stint in tech that didn’t leave much room for work-life balance. Today, they triage tickets, lead migrations, and still find time to think hard about the systems the rest of us take for granted. 

Jayke is an immigrant — French, born in the Netherlands, and raised across Scotland, Singapore, and California before landing in Massachusetts. They speak French and English fluently, plus conversational Spanish and ASL. 

That idea — that no one is reducible to a single identity — echoed across the entire conversation. 

Inclusion as infrastructure 

Ask Jayke to define an inclusive workplace, and you won’t hear them quote company policy or corporate clichés.  

“It’s a thing that enables employees to be their fullest self, to work as their fullest self,” they explain. “For some folks, that means being able to mention things about their personal life without affecting their opportunities. For others, it’s being able to work the way they’re able to work best.” 

The proof shows up in the small stuff: whether documentation is written in plain language, whether a screen reader can parse it, whether the tools we use every day reflect who we actually are. 

“Does the workplace use systems that help folks use the names they want? Or is everyone restricted to using their on-paper legal name?” Jayke asks.

At Bonterra, the answer matters: Slack, Zoom, and Workday are set up so the name someone goes by is the name that shows up. The same logic can be applied to benefits like health insurance. “If a health insurance plan isn’t legally required to cover gender-affirming care, it won’t,” Jayke says. “That means trans employees will have to pay for all of it out of pocket.” Who counts as family is another version of the same question — one that hits hard for employees who, for all kinds of reasons, can’t or don’t marry their partners. This is what Jayke means by inclusion as infrastructure. It lives in benefits design, vendor selection, and the defaults quietly baked into every tool we touch. 

And those defaults extend to the assumptions we make about each other. “Most people assume I use he/him pronouns, and that’s not the case. That assumption isn’t a safe bet — or even a non-harmful bet — to make.” When asked about the role of work allies, Jayke spoke these wise words:

Pride, in this moment 

True inclusion goes beyond once-a-year campaigns or lines in a policy. True inclusive design lives in the daily choices we make about the systems we build, the assumptions we challenge, and the people we make room for. Jayke’s insights are a reminder that the work is ongoing, and that joy, in the face of everything, is its own act of resistance. 

So are we, Jayke. Happy Pride.