Leading with Vision and Equity

At MCAD, we are honored to walk alongside faculty whose lived experience, wisdom, and courage light the path for our students. Today we celebrate Adel El Huni—faculty in our Creative Leadership program, as he also steps into another role as the inaugural Executive Director of the Minnesota Catalyst Alliance.

Adel brings with him over two decades of global and domestic experience in community-development finance, philanthropic fundraising, and equity-centered leadership. His career has been defined by one through-line: mobilizing resources to uplift people, spark creativity, and advance justice. Across four continents, Adel has helped raise and deploy more than $70 million for transformative initiatives ranging from affordable housing and refugee livelihoods to small-business growth and creative-economy ventures.

Earlier in his career, Adel spent more than a decade at Wells Fargo, where his leadership reached both national and global scales. He advised central banks and financial institutions, and he championed alternative-financing models for BIPOC and immigrant entrepreneurs—always asking how systems of capital could better serve the people too often excluded from them.

At the Minnesota Catalyst Alliance, Adel will continue this life’s work. His charge is nothing less than bold: to strengthen and scale Minnesota’s BIPOC-owned businesses, creating a more just and thriving economy for all. With Adel’s vision, Minnesota’s entrepreneurial landscape will be shaped by equity, creativity, and care.

Those who know Adel will tell you: his leadership style is marked by deep listening and strategic vision. He has a gift for holding complexity—seeing the whole system, the forces at play, the hidden connections—and then helping teams design pathways forward that are both pragmatic and transformative. His presence reminds us that leadership is not about control or status, but about aligning resources with purpose, and aligning people with possibility.

Adel’s work is a testament to the kind of leadership our world most needs: rooted in equity, expansive in vision, and unafraid to imagine systems that truly serve.