People Over Projects: Henry Rael
Henry Rael has been with the McCune Charitable Foundation, a strong supporter of TWP’s work in New Mexico, for more than 13 years. As the director of strategy and initiatives, Henry has been instrumental in helping position the foundation as a leader in deeply collaborative, trust-based approaches to grant making.
Henry: “Our strategic plan started with the metaphor of the acequia, which is a shared structure that enables people to access water. It's owned by everybody, everybody has a role that they play within it, and if everybody plays their role and collaborates, everybody benefits. So as the theme of our strategic plan, that's how we formally launched this shift in terms of how we were going about grant making.”
Through listening openly to the needs and challenges of grantees, Henry and the McCune team helped strengthen the foundation’s emphasis on unrestricted grants, multi-year support, and relationship-based approaches.
Henry: “Though we've only adopted these practices formally here at the Mccune Foundation over the last five or six years, the foundation has always operated from an ethos, from a recognition that the state of New Mexico is really a big small town….We're all really connected, and especially how long a lot of our families have been here, you just see the opportunity for connection on a different level. I think that being able to take that connectivity, that culture, and allow that to actually manifest in the nonprofit sector is something that I don't think is necessarily a goal of trust-based philanthropy, but it's definitely something that I've seen over time.”
Henry was born and raised in Albuquerque, the 13th generation of his family in New Mexico. His deep connection to the state, cultural background, and career experience, alongside the McCune Foundation’s familial roots, all influence the emphasis he places on relationships within his work.
Henry: “The way I think about philanthropy is informed by my culture, my history, but it's also been informed by other elements of my career. I worked in the semiconductor industry and a concept that really drove a lot of development and innovation was integration….So what does that have to do with philanthropy? Coming back to my culture here in New Mexico, it was just very intuitive to me that things had to be more connected, more integrated. It's hard work to make things connect, to make them so they work together, so that they're operating as one. But that's what our communities have always done here. They've always relied on each other. They've maintained their individuality, but at the same time understood their connection to each other, to the earth, to the river, to the sun, to all things. So it just just seemed really clear to me, looking at the philanthropic sector – what can we do to make it more integrated? How can we build trust so that groups can work together? How do we take the burdens away from organizations so they don’t have to just think about their survival, and they can actually look at their neighbor? What do we not need to scrap? And what can we build, together?”
