After eleven years with our Firm, Kunal is stepping into a new role: San Francisco’s first Chief of Health, Homelessness, and Family Services—a position focused on behavioral health, the local unsheltered community, and the city’s support and services for residents.
The role is a mayoral appointment that will require Kunal to coordinate across eight departments and thousands of employees. And it’s a position he’s been working toward since the day he started at McKinsey (even if he didn’t yet know it).
When he started as a BA, Kunal immediately plugged into his office’s community service efforts. “It’s been a priority since the day I joined,” he reflects. “It’s always been important to me to use our Firm’s platform, capabilities, and resources to make a positive difference in the communities that we live and work in beyond what we already do with our clients.”
He built deep client and pro bono relationships to that end, helping conduct extensive research on the systemic causes of homelessness and on effective support systems to help San Francisco’s unhoused people better access permanent solutions.
Colleagues from across the San Francisco Office have joined in through sustained volunteer initiatives and pro bono engagements. Kunal explains, “This is not just one team, or a small group of colleagues affiliated with our work. This has really become the culture of our office.”
Kunal sat down with us to reflect on the career that has led to his recent appointment and on how it will shape his approach to this new role.
Congratulations on your recent appointment!
Kunal: Thank you. It’s truly a reflection of the entire San Francisco Office and the incredible pro bono contributions of colleagues there over the past several years. I’m very excited to get to work on behalf of the city!
With such a large remit that you’ve been given, how are you keeping from feeling overwhelmed?
We all aspire to have the way we spend our time be of consequence, particularly when it comes to the problems that we want to see solved. Just to have a chance to play a meaningful role in shaping the city that I’m raising a family in is an immense privilege.
So, I don’t look at it as something that’s excessively daunting or overwhelming, but really just as a privilege. And that’s all we can ask for. I’m really fired up, honestly, to take on what has been a multi-decade-long intractable challenge locally (and in many cities around the world).
For such an “intractable challenge,” what will success look like?
Ultimately, it comes down to the individuals most in need—that we’re getting them the right care and treatment to help them have more self-sustaining and fulfilling lives. What we don’t want is for people to be stuck treading water; we want to help them get to the other side.
We want all San Franciscans to feel that they’re part of a community where the government works so that everyone can enjoy our public spaces and feel proud of our city. This pride should come from the feeling of walking around San Francisco and from knowing how we went about the work, treating people with the dignity they deserve.
That means affordable housing production and income supports. It means having the right inventory of shelter, having the right capacity of triage treatment, ensuring our outreach and street teams are as effective as they can be.
I hope we can develop a model of government that delivers on some of the biggest challenges facing our city. Far too often we’ve had really good aspirations, while the lived experience of those policy visions has fallen short.
What we aspire to do, both in the work that I’m leading and the broader administration, is to bridge that gap to say, “We can have big, bold goals, and we can deliver against them.” That second part is more important today than ever because the public is rightfully frustrated. I’m frustrated with the level of delivery we’ve seen.
I accepted this role in hopes that I could be part of that solution. I want to say, “Here’s what it looks like when government works well.”
We owe that to the community we serve.
As you’ve discussed here (and as you found in your research while you were at McKinsey), even for the well-intentioned there’s so many barriers. How will you align disparate stakeholders and get at the underlying problem?
A few things come to mind. One is really understanding the motivations, perspectives, and aspirations of various players. It may sound a little Pollyanna-ish, but we have a tendency to make assumptions about why someone holds a certain set of beliefs. That becomes (in this arena) very oppositional very quickly. You can’t bridge all those divides, but it’s worth understanding them because usually at their root there’s either real positive intent or real fear. We need to understand and address that.
The second is to be really dogmatic about the realities of what it takes to have a sustainable solution: more affordable housing, more treatment, and the right balance of enforcement and treatment. Backed by clear, evidence-based research, we need to say, “I understand you have a different perspective, but the facts are this...”
It takes commitment to proven and research-backed answers, through hard conversations and political challenges. It can’t be about self-preservation or a “next term.”
How did your time with our Firm prepare you for this?
Our work here is to take on the really difficult challenges that institutions and individuals face and help them navigate those through some kind of breakthrough that gets them to the other side.
In some ways, I’ll approach this new role very much like I would many problems I tackled during my time at the Firm: listen a lot early on, get to know those involved, talk to people outside of formal buildings—the ones who actually experience homelessness or behavioral health crises and are on the receiving ends of services—so that I can better understand their perspectives.
Ultimately, these are systems-level challenges, experienced very deeply at the individual level. In our work with the Firm, we’re trained to see how all the different parts of a system interact—how all the players come together to deliver services that help individuals in a human-centered, personalized, and empathetic way.
One of the things that made our work on homelessness in San Francisco so impactful was that we learned from what other offices had done on the topic, and we collaborated with even more offices who started to take up the efforts that we began. In that exchange with Seattle, Denver, New York, Los Angeles… we traded insights about what local stakeholders were seeing, what programs and services worked in one context but maybe not in another, and what actually might be transferable.
Given our extensive network of offices and established frameworks, we’re well suited to take on this challenge as a Firm; those skills we develop here position us well to continue these efforts as alumni as we go off into various institutions that seek to drive really focused change.
How did you use your last few weeks at our Firm to set yourself up to be the kind of alum you want to be?
Ultimately, the Firm is about people and it’s about relationships with colleagues and clients. Accordingly, in my last month here, I connected with colleagues to seek their guidance, but also to share a bit of what I hope to achieve.
The outpouring of support and offers to help with ongoing problem-solving was touching and extraordinary.
You get very reflective as you start to go through these transitions. So, I squeezed in as many conversations with colleagues and clients as possible. I'm confident that they will continue to be a part of my life as an alum.
It’s become so clear to me that our Firm’s community extends beyond your last day.