Community servant gets a buzz

• Published date: 03 June 2021
• Publication title: Mountain Scene

Most often it’s those close to retirement age, but in the case of Ray Key, who came here in 2011 and is donkey-deep in community activities, he’s still only 48.

He’s chair of the Wakatipu Community Foundation, through which people are leaving bequests for charitable purposes, chair of the Community Foundations of New Zealand, trustee of the housing trust and community hub charitable trust, on the council’s post-Covid regenerative recovery advisory group and on the Queenstown Alpine Ski Team committee.

Oh, and he also runs a beekeeping business as a social enterprise.

Educated at Dunedin’s King’s High, a year behind Finance Minister Grant Robertson, he got honours in finance and economics at Otago University.

He then enjoyed a stellar, lucrative 19-year career as a financial trader and commodities merchant in Auckland, Sydney and London.

Having grown up in a state house, ‘‘it helped me to become really ambitious to want to do well’’, he says.

For his first job, with Bankers Trust, his second interview was with later-Prime Minister John Key, ‘‘which was helpful given my middle name is John’’.

His final London-based gig was running Deutsche Bank’s global metals business.

By then he was ‘‘really missing NZ’’ and wanting to bring up his young family here, too.

Key says he was swayed by a survey of school leavers that found their biggest regret was they hadn’t spent more time with their dad.

Queenstown was logical for a Dunedin boy — he’d married Janet here in 2002 and also owned a Kelvin Heights property that he later traded for a Ladies Mile lifestyle block.

For the first year he continued to run the global metals business, spending six weeks here and then the next six in London and China.

A year later, he and four partners set up their own global commodities company, which he exited four years later to immerse himself in community roles.

His first was with the community housing trust, which then-chair David Cole asked him to join.

He believes it’s NZ’s most innovative housing trust, citing the land it’s gifted by greenfields...