When Paula Tanasescu joined McKinsey, she never imagined she’d be riding in a van with former gang members, visiting dog grooming businesses. Emma Moriarty didn’t expect that an eighth-grade history project—supporting a farmer in Ghana with a microloan—would come full circle in her professional life. Yet through McKinsey’s nonprofit fellowship program, where consultants dedicate six to 12 months to a nonprofit, both Paula and Emma found themselves using their McKinsey expertise to help grassroots organizations make a difference on the ground.
In 2024, nearly 50 McKinsey fellows were deployed globally to support nonprofits in areas such as health, sustainability, and the arts through improved strategy, data, analytics, AI, and more. Many of the organizations are focused on economic opportunity—a key pillar of McKinsey’s broader mission to build strong institutions, develop resilient workforces, and equip people with the skills needed to succeed.
Paula, who worked with Homeboy Industries, and Emma, who was embedded at Kiva U.S., share their fellowship experiences, highlighting the innovative solutions they implemented and the deep connections they built with the communities they served.
Paula Tanasescu: Strengthening Homeboy Industries’ impact
Homeboy Industries, based in Los Angeles, is the world’s largest reentry organization for formerly incarcerated gang members. Their healing-centric program offers training and support so people can transform their lives and become contributing members of their communities. Founded in 1988 by Jesuit priest Father Greg Boyle, Homeboy expanded in 2014 with the Global Homeboy Network, offering technical assistance to 400 organizations across the US and internationally.
Creating pathways to stable employment
At Homeboy, I worked every day alongside individuals who were on a journey to completely transform their lives. I built relationships with the Homeboy clients, or “Homies,” including one who celebrated her first year of sobriety with us.
Some of the Homies haven’t worked in decades, or perhaps ever, and finding stable employment is one of the biggest challenges they face. To help trainees land jobs, Homeboy has 13 social enterprises that provide trainees with on-the-job practice in a supportive environment. McKinsey has previously provided pro bono support to strengthen these enterprises.
I helped launch Homeboy’s latest, a dog grooming business. I traveled with program participants to training partners where they learned the business in preparation for staffing Homeboy’s own dog grooming salon, now open in Pasadena. I helped implement micro-credentials and skills badges across some of the social enterprises to better align training and effectively communicate with employer partners.
Enhancing organizational strategy
In addition to working on programs, I supported the leadership in strengthening organizational practices. The atmosphere there is very open, but there were silos between various departments that resulted in duplication, and, like most nonprofits, the staff was focused on delivering their mission, leaving little time to focus on process improvements. I thought, “How do you balance delivering on the mission with efficiency?” To help streamline their operations, I offered new structures and frameworks for how to operate, clarified roles to determine who should be in meetings and who the decision-makers were, and aligned everyone on a “North Star,” all of which helped save time and improved communication.
Homeboy never gives up on anyone who walks through its doors for help, because they understand healing is not a straight path. Their commitment and core tenets of unconditional love and kinship were inspiring, and I feel proud that they embraced me into their Homeboy family.
Emma Moriarty: Scaling Kiva’s microfinance impact in the US
Founded in 2005, Kiva is an international organization that provides small interest-free loans to businesses and entrepreneurs. It has lent over $2 billion to more than five million people in 62 countries. Emma focused her fellowship on Kiva U.S., launched in 2011, helping increase funding for borrowers, offer greater technical assistance, and boost repayment rates.
In eighth grade, my history class used Kiva to fund a farmer in Ghana, and I never forgot this simple and direct way to lift people out of poverty. My fellowship with Kiva U.S. gave me the chance to find innovative ways to scale microfinance and see firsthand how impactful it is.
Streamlining loan applications with AI
Kiva U.S. receives around 10,000 loan applications per year, funding about 1,000, with most of the loans requiring a few years of support—and it does this with only seven staff members. To help streamline loan application screenings, we partnered with Carrington Labs, which developed an AI tool that assigned a risk score to borrowers based on their data.
Expanding national partnerships to help borrowers
One thing keeping Kiva U.S. from broader impact was its local funding model, which could not accommodate national partners. Partner organizations, many of which are local governments or philanthropic foundations, recruit borrowers to the Kiva platform and provide loan application and business support. Kiva’s platform was set up, from the back end to marketing, by zip code, making national partnerships challenging—especially for partners that work across the country to support Black and Indigenous entrepreneurs.
I helped expand the existing local model to a national one, allowing organizations anywhere in the US to recruit prospective borrowers to the Kiva platform and help them with the application and their business. We created a go-to-market strategy, sales playbook, and marketing materials, which so far have brought in three new partners, funding 75 borrowers (including 38 Black-owned businesses) at over $1.3 million.
Reducing loan defaults through better communications
One of the major challenges Kiva U.S. wanted to address was late payments. I helped integrate direct mailings to borrowers through Salesforce, so every new borrower and person at risk of default receives information on their loan and their next repayment date. It has only been a few months, but already we’ve seen these enhanced communications reduce defaults by 9 percent and increase first repayments by 8 percent.
As part of my work, we hosted a panel at the Kiva-wide company meeting and a discussion with María José Cortés, who received a $5,000 interest-free loan from Kiva. This helped her expand her candle business from selling in six stores to nearly thirty. She’s working toward opening her own store and has hired her parents and her sister to work with her. Seeing how Kiva helped her become a fully independent entrepreneur was so rewarding—a very tangible impact that we will be seeing a lot more of.