Sometimes, an organization gets lucky. Sometimes, an extraordinarily talented person emerges from its ranks and, simply by following his instincts, comes to personify what the organization is striving to be. Sometimes, that person contributes for a long time, cooking up a seemingly endless string of inventive ideas, leading by marvelous, inspiring example, and becoming beloved inside the organization and out. And sometimes, if it’s lucky, the organization has a chance to offer a public thanks. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation got lucky with Terrance Keenan.

In December, Terrance, or Terry as friends and colleagues know him, formally retired from RWJF after 31 years of service, but he remains a formidable intellectual presence, inspiration and contributor. He was with the Foundation from the beginning and, during his tenure, he helped expand the Foundation from a fledgling organization to an influential leader in improving the health and health care of all Americans.

“He was an ambassador at large for the world of philanthropy,” said Edward Robbins, former director of RWJF’s Office of Proposal Management. “Anyone who ever came into contact with Terry felt differently about philanthropy afterward. He cares about people, particularly those who are downtrodden, and that really came across.”

Within RWJF, Terry’s influence can be judged by the number of once-controversial ideas that he championed and eventually brought into the mainstream. His longtime friend and colleague Frank Karel, RWJF’s former vice president for communications, offers a particularly Keenansian insight.

When RWJF first started making grants nationwide, Karel said, “We would parachute into a community, give some money to start something, and then when our three or four years of support were up, the people we had funded would start knocking on doors looking for more money. Some of the small local foundations were getting upset.” Terry’s solution? A program that identified proposals from local and community foundations that meshed with RWJF guidelines and offered matching money up to $500,000. The Local Initiative Funding Partners Program that Terry conceived is now properly recognized as one of RWJF’s signature efforts. “It was an absolute stroke of genius,” Karel said.

Similarly, Terry saw nurses as skilled medical professionals when most of the medical community viewed them as support staff. “He single-handedly encouraged the Foundation to become interested in nursing’s contributions to primary care,” said Rheba de Tornyay, dean and professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Nursing in Seattle and trustee emeritus of the Foundation.

Often a “love-hate feeling” simmers between grantees and the foundations that fund them—and there can be mutterings about arrogance and lack of sensitivity and responsiveness. Not so with Terry. Regarded as a consummate grantmaker, he has been especially appreciated by novice grant applicants because he worked hardest for them. If they had the germ of an idea, he was always willing to take the time and do the work to help them develop their thoughts and their plan.

In many ways, his modus operandi was an exact match with the Foundation’s Guiding Principles: Always remembering that the organization represents a public trust; recognizing the primacy of new ideas and innovation; and demanding of himself and others the highest professional performance.

But Terry’s greatest legacy may be the example he set for his peers and colleagues, said Steven Schroeder, former president of RWJF: “People have told me that he’s their role model. They’d like to grow up to be like Terry Keenan.”