Raquel Gutierrez, Ph.D., Board Co-Chair
CEO, Blue Agave Partners
Dr. Gutierrez serves as Principal of Blue Agave Partners. She brings three decades of experience in curating knowledge, cultivating courageous leaders, and designing programs and convenings for community-wide initiatives. At her core, Raquel is an institutional organizer who partners with others who value personal transformation, continual learning, daily practice, and sustained wellness. She demonstrates a unique ability to create compassionate spaces for learning and building relationships rooted in the very essence of philanthropy— “love for humanity.”
Among her peers, she is recognized for freely sharing resources, building connections between groups unfamiliar to one another, and creating opportunities for emerging and mid-career leaders to personally and professionally thrive. Raquel excels at cultivating an organizational culture where people are inspired to explore possibilities outside their routine paradigms and practices to improve impact. Raquel is known for her masterful facilitation and training, program and strategy development with an equity lens, promoting a broad spectrum of consultants, ontological coaching, and relationship building.
Raquel co-chairs the Arizona Grantmakers Forum on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion affinity group and serves as a Program Committee member. She is currently the first chair for the Arizona Girl Scouts Cactus-Pine Council Board of Directors and joined ProInspire’s Board of Directors in 2020. From 2018 to 2020 she served as the Director of Leadership and Learning at Hispanics in Philanthropy where she refreshed and launched a national mid-career leadership development program for Latinx professionals in philanthropy and nonprofits, supported a major transition in executive leadership, and piloted an internal initiative to establish Hispanic in Philanthropy’s applied racial equity framework. From 2013 to 2018, Raquel served as Director of Strategic Leadership and Practice at Vitalyst Health Foundation where she successfully navigated new funding for community-based organizations led by early to mid-career people of color in Arizona and supported the launch of a consulting network for new and seasoned people of color. Raquel was conferred with a Ph.D. in Leadership and Change from Antioch University where her dissertation explored the alignment between the values and practices of social justice workers.