Lynn Taliento is a Partner in the Washington, DC office of McKinsey & Company. During the past 2 years she has co-led the effort to create the firm's Nonprofit Practice. She works exclusively with national and international nonprofit organizations on issues of strategy, organization, and operations. Examples of her recent engagements include: designing a new vision and strategy for the United Way system, working with a venture philanthropy fund to develop effective capacity building practices in nonprofit organizations, and helping a large, global public-private alliance to improve its governance structure and processes. Taliento is fluent in Spanish and spent four years in McKinsey's Mexico City office where she worked on strategy and policy engagements for clients in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Prior to joining McKinsey in 1994, Taliento worked as advisor to the Minister of the Economy of the Czech Republic, and as a press secretary in the US House of Representatives. Taliento graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a bachelor of arts degree in American studies, and she earned a master's degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where she was a Kennedy Fellow.