Sarah Tucker-Ray

Sarah advises leaders in government, non-profits, and the private sector to develop new strategies and improve operations. She specializes in helping governments better deliver services through customer-experience and design approaches and promote economic growth through strategic investment. She has worked in the United States across federal, state, and local levels and with national governments globally. Alongside her client work, Sarah is a leader of the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility, McKinsey’s internal think tank focused on inclusive economic growth.

Sarah founded McKinsey’s public sector customer experience forum and regularly hosts workshops to bring the best of private-sector innovation to governments. She supports government leaders to grow the economy and improve public–private engagement, which often includes considerations of the most effective use of infrastructure investment, regulation, incentives, and other tools.

Examples of Sarah’s recent client work include the following:

• supporting multiple state and national governments on operations transformations, including for infrastructure delivery and frontline service delivery
• helping numerous US states and national governments with economic-development work, including designing plans focused on housing and infrastructure
• working with local governments on housing, transportation, and economic-opportunity issues
• improving internal operations, including significant reductions in time to hire and better delivery of shared services, for federal agencies
• supporting leading private-sector companies on customer-experience and human-centered-design issues
• designing strategy-development initiatives for major nongovernmental organizations, including major think tanks and foundations

Prior to joining McKinsey, Sarah worked in federal and local governments in roles focused on promoting economic opportunity and improving government operations.

In 2014, Next City named Sarah a Vanguard, an honor awarded to 40 urban leaders across the United States working to improve cities. Sarah serves on the board of a community-development financial institution in Memphis, Tennessee; was the finance chair and a founding board member for a public charter school in Brooklyn, New York; and has consulted with not-for-profit organizations on economic development in Trenton, New Jersey, Memphis, Tennessee, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Washington, DC.