Nelson Cunningham is managing partner and cofounder of McLarty Associates, an international strategic advisory firm based in Washington, D.C., with associates in New York, New Delhi, Vienna, Hong Kong, São Paulo, Tokyo, and Manila. McLarty Associates counsels corporations, financial institutions, and NGOs in the United States and abroad on strategic planning, government issues and advocacy, market access, mergers and acquisitions, corporate communication, and political and economic risk issues. He also has served the country in several public capacities.
A magna cum laude graduate of Yale in history, Mr. Cunningham obtained a J.D. in 1983 from Stanford University, where he was an editor of the Law Review. He clerked for the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals and, after time in private practice, was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1988 until 1994, where he prosecuted international white-collar and narcotics trials and was promoted to deputy chief of criminal appeals.
In 1994 Mr. Cunningham became General Counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee, focusing on constitutional, judicial, and criminal justice matters. From 1995 to 1997 he served the Clinton administration as General Counsel of the White House Office of Administration, advising on general government issues and business law.
He then served as Special Adviser to President Clinton on Western Hemisphere affairs, and as Senior Adviser to Thomas F. McLarty III, the White House Chief of Staff and then Special Envoy for the Americas. Mr. Cunningham, who as a boy lived in Mexico, El Salvador, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina, helped coordinate the United States' participation in the 1998 Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile, and integrated the political, foreign policy, and communications aspects of the presidential agenda for Latin America.
Since Mr. Cunningham helped cofound McLarty Associates in 1998, the firm has advised almost 150 multinationals and NGOs including some of the world's best-known institutions, such as Google, UPS, Anheuser- Busch, MetLife, Gilead Sciences, and the Gates Foundation, on their international strategies and helped them advance projects abroad in over sixty countries. As managing partner, he expanded the firm to the world's key markets. Formerly known as Kissinger McLarty Associates, the firm maintained a relationship with Kissinger Associates, Inc., from 1999 to 2008.
Mr. Cunningham speaks frequently on foreign policy, trade, and economic policy issues. He was a foreign policy and trade adviser to the presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Barack Obama, as well as a member of the Obama-Biden transition team. He is a member of the boards of the Institute of the Americas, the Business Council for International Understanding, and the American Security Project, and is active with the Council of the Americas and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Since 2004 Mr. Cunningham has served on the President's Council on International Activities, a group that advises President Levin on Yale's international agenda. He also is an adviser to the Yale World Fellows Program, assisting in review and selection of Fellows and facilitating a variety of program activities for the Fellows in Washington, D.C. For his efforts, he received a certificate of distinguished service in 2006, the only such honor awarded since the program's inception in 2001.
Mr. Cunningham and his wife, Margery, live in Washington, D.C., with their daughter.
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Sharon Ruwart is managing director of the Beijing office of APCO Worldwide, a global public affairs and strategic communications firm with twenty-nine offices worldwide, which provides services across the business, government, media, and NGO/nonprofit sectors. APCO helps companies devise market-entry strategies, map government bureaucracies and policies, develop corporate social responsibility programs, communicate through the media, and avoid or manage crises. Ms. Ruwart advises clients in a range of sectors, from media to mining. Before joining APCO, she was managing director for Elsevier Science & Technology, also in Beijing.
After majoring in Russian and East European studies at Yale, Ms. Ruwart was a Yale-China Teaching Fellow from 1985 to 1987 and taught English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and at Xiangya School of Medicine at Central South University in Changsha, Hunan province. Thereafter, Ms. Ruwart held a number of management positions with Knight-Ridder, Inc., in marketing and production, ad sales, and editorial operations, and with the World Health Organization as a consultant in its health promotion department. She also served as editor-in-chief of The China Business Review. In 1994 she earned an M.B.A. from Stanford University with a certificate in public management and a concentration in the financial management of nonprofit organizations.
In 1997 she became vice president for marketing at E-Loan, Inc., in California. Ms. Ruwart created the company's first brand strategy and was selected as one of the "Top 10 Financial Marketers of 2000" by Financial Marketers Magazine, a designation she shared with marketing executives from American Express, Merrill Lynch, and Charles Schwab.
In 2004 Ms. Ruwart, who is fluent in Mandarin, moved back to China with her family and served as director of special projects at Caijing Magazine, a leading Beijing-based finance publication. From 2006 to 2008, as managing director for Elsevier Science & Technology, China, a division of the publishing company Reed Elsevier, she spearheaded efforts to help Chinese institutions invest in access to tools and information to promote scientific discovery. Ms. Ruwart helped position Elsevier as a partner in the country's science and technology establishment by building relationships with its science and technology officials and principal researchers to promote the development of China's research capabilities.
In her current position at APCO, Ms. Ruwart leads a team of fifty in Beijing out of a total staff in China of seventy-five. The firm also has offices in Shanghai and Guangzhou and regional headquarters in Hong Kong. Established in 1989, and through its 1999 acquisition of Batey Burn, the foremost independent China investment and government relations consultancy, APCO is a recognized leader providing investment, government relations, and communication solutions in China. The firm provides a global reach with local knowledge working with multinational companies and NGOs to maximize opportunities that contribute positively to China's development objectives.
Ms. Ruwart was elected in 2008 to the Board of Governors of the American Chamber of Commerce in China.
In 2005 she and her husband, Thomas Melcher '85, helped launch "Bulldogs in Beijing," which provides summer internships for Yale College students in China's capital. She is an Alumni Schools Committee volunteer, an AYA Assembly delegate, and a vice president of the Yale Club of Beijing.
Ms. Ruwart and her husband live in Beijing with their two daughters.
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Neal Keny-Guyer is the chief executive officer of Mercy Corps, a position he has held since 1994. Mercy Corps, the world's fifth largest international relief and development agency, has operations in thirty-seven countries, and its staff of 3,700 provides assistance to more than 16.4 million people annually. Mercy Corps has provided $1.5 billion in assistance to people in 107 nations.
After graduating from Duke University in 1976 with a B.A. in public policy and religion, Mr. Keny-Guyer began his career in community and public service as special projects coordinator for Cities In Schools, working with at-risk youth in inner cities of Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. In 1980 he moved to Thailand to focus on Cambodia's refugees and war victims for CARE/UNICEF, where, as field coordinator, he organized an emergency relief program along the Thai-Cambodian border, including cross-border distribution of food and agricultural supplies.
In 1982 he began his nine-year tenure with Save the Children, where he designed and implemented high-impact relief and development programs in war-torn regions including Lebanon, West Bank/Gaza, Afghanistan/ Pakistan, and Sudan. As director of the agency's Middle East, North Africa, and Europe programs, Mr. Keny-Guyer managed a $44 million budget and supervised 900 staff in ten countries.
Following Save the Children, Mr. Keny-Guyer spent one year as a "stay- at-home" dad and then offered strategic planning and organization development consulting to businesses, foundations, and nonprofit agencies through 1993.
Mercy Corps works to alleviate suffering, poverty, and oppression around the world, and focuses on people whose lives have been affected by conflict or natural disasters. The agency is known for its rapid humanitarian responses, such as its role following the Southeast Asian tsunami when it dispatched a team to Sumatra within twenty-four hours of the catastrophe, and for its efforts to facilitate social advancement, such as its work to improve the delivery of financial services for the poor through wholesale banking and technology platforms. Mr. Keny-Guyer has advised Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton on international disaster relief efforts.
Today, many of Mercy Corps' most significant programs are in transitional environments like Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and Somalia. For example, it has worked in Afghanistan since 1986 and is currently assisting 2.5 million Afghans. The agency's market-based agricultural development programs in Afghanistan include training farmers on new techniques, operating agricultural high schools, and establishing now privatized veterinary care units. In 2003 Mercy Corps created one of the country's first microfinance institutions focused on helping women start small businesses.
Mr. Keny-Guyer serves on the boards of InterAction, an alliance of humanitarian and development organizations, and ImagineNations, a development program for youth in third-world nations; and on the Nike Foundation Advisory Group. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Portland State University, Oregon, in 2005.
At Yale, he is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Yale School of Management. He received the School's Alumni Association Achievement Award at its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2002 and was elected Commencement speaker the following year. He also has been an admissions volunteer and interviewer. In 2005 he joined the President's Council on International Activities, a group that advises President Levin on Yale's international agenda.
Mr. Keny-Guyer and his wife, Alissa, live in Portland, Oregon, with their three children.