Leader Moving From a Small Charity to a Big Foundation Finds a New Voice

Denver Foundation

December 5, 2017 | Read Time: 2 minutes

Christine Marquez-Hudson took the helm of the Mi Casa Resource Center in Denver just as the Great Recession started to bear down. It was a challenging time to be a nonprofit leader, but she led the small social-services group’s charge into green-jobs training. Mi Casa’s early adoption helped it win a $3.6 million grant as part of the federal government’s stimulus effort, a huge amount that increased the number of people the group could serve and boosted its profile in the city.

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Last year, Ms. Marquez-Hudson took on what she calls her dream job — CEO of the Denver Foundation — and joined the small but growing ranks of Latinos who lead large foundations.

She’s excited to build on the fund’s 92-year history while creating new ways to help more people give: “We want to be a community foundation that is known to be a home for all philanthropists.”

There’s one thing Ms. Marquez-Hudson is still working on: how to calibrate her leadership style to her new platform.

The executive director of a small, ethnic organization has to beat her chest to get attention, while the head of the largest community foundation in the Mountain West has a bully pulpit, says Ms. Marquez-Hudson.

“You can’t go out and be a megaphone on every issue, every day, or people will stop listening to you.”

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About the Author

NICOLE WALLACE

Features Editor

Nicole Wallace is features editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has written about innovation in the nonprofit world, charities’ use of data to improve their work and to boost fundraising, advanced technologies for social good, and hybrid efforts at the intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, such as social enterprise and impact investing.Nicole spearheaded the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast and reported from India on the role of philanthropy in rebuilding after the South Asian tsunami. She started at the Chronicle in 1996 as an editorial assistant compiling The Nonprofit Handbook.Before joining the Chronicle, Nicole worked at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and served in the inaugural class of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.A native of Columbia, Pa., she holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.