Brewster Kahle and Mary K. Austin
/SOURCE OF WEALTH: WAIS Inc.; Alexa Internet
FUNDING AREAS: Digital Access, Arts and Culture, Education, Affordable Housing
OVERVIEW: Brewster Kahle and his wife, Mary K. Austin, conduct their grantmaking through the San Francisco-based Kahle-Austin Foundation. The foundation supports information access and archival efforts and has given millions to the Internet Archive, which stores books, recordings and images for free online access. To a lesser extent, the foundation funds arts and education. The couple also established the Kahle-Austin Foundation House, through which they provide permanently affordable housing to nonprofit employees in San Francisco. Most recently, the foundation has conducted its grantmaking through the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund.
BACKGROUND: Brewster Kahle earned a degree from MIT in 1982, and in 1983, he helped start Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker, serving as lead engineer for six years. In 1989, Kahle invented the Internet’s first publishing system, the WAIS system, and also founded WAIS Inc., a pioneering electronic publishing company. WAIS Inc. was sold to America Online in 1995 for $15 million. Another project, Alexa Internet, which logged Internet traffic patterns and recommended sites, went to Amazon for $250 million in 1999. Kahle is a founder and leader of the Internet Archive and helped implement the Wayback Machine, which allows public access to the World Wide Web archive that the Internet Archive has been gathering since 1996. Additionally, Kahle is attempting to collect a single print copy of every book that has ever been published; he keeps these in specially climatized storage containers.
ISSUES:
DIGITAL ACCESS: Kahle and Austin, through their Kahle-Austin Foundation, support Internet Archive, a nonprofit, free library of millions of books, movies, software, music and more, which was established under the principle of "universal access to knowledge." The Internet Archive has also supported other Internet-era issues, such as net neutrality. Over the last decade, tens of millions in funding went to the Internet Archive. Support has also gone to related organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "a donor-supported membership organization working to protect fundamental rights regardless of technology;" Public Knowledge, "a nonprofit Washington, D.C.-based public interest group that is involved in intellectual property law, competition, and choice in the digital marketplace, and an open standards/end-to-end internet;" and the Free Software Foundation, "a nonprofit organization founded to support the free software movement, which promotes the universal freedom to study." Public Knowledge, of which Kahle is the co-founder and director, has received $100,000 a year every year since 2013, making it the single largest recipient of the Kahle-Austin Foundation's annual distributions behind the Internet Archive and the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund.
ARTS & CULTURE: Mary is a collector of artists' books and has some 2,000 pieces in her collection. She co-founded and is the board president of the San Francisco Center for the Book, which offers "book arts classes, lectures and exhibitions for Bay Area Artists," and more than 400 workshops annually, with letterpress printing, bookbinding, and general bookmaking instruction as priorities. Other past grantees include the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts, the Center for Art In Translation, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Bread and Puppet Theatre in Vermont. Kahle-Austin also supports more conventional arts and culture institutions such as the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco’s Exploratorium and the Long Now Foundation, which was established to "develop Clock and Library projects."
EDUCATION: The Kahle-Austion Foundation’s recent education funding has mainly supported online educational programs and educational technology initiatives. A significant portion of recent funding has gone to the Frank Foundation, which supports technology-based solutions to problems in education. The foundation has also supported Oberlin College, Wellesley College, Oberlin College, San Francisco’s Urban High School and the Presidio Hill School in San Francisco.
AFFORDABLE HOUSING: Kahle runs a blog, featuring his thoughts on housing, education, food and health in the United States. After a series of musings on the expensive housing market in San Francisco in particular, Kahle announced a new vehicle, the Kahle-Austin Foundation House, through which he wants to provide permanently affordable housing to nonprofit employees by purchasing apartment buildings. So far, the Kahle/Austin Foundation House has purchased an 11-unit apartment building in close proximity to Kahle's own nonprofit, the Internet Archive. Little has been said about this program since 2013, however.
OTHER: Past grantees also include Democracy Now!, the ACLU Foundation, Planned Parenthood and the San Francisco Foundation, which supports a variety of programs and initiatives to improve social equality and upward economic mobility for communities in the Bay Area.
LOOKING FORWARD: The Kahle-Austin Foundation’s giving has fluctuated between $1.6 and about $7 million in recent years. While the foundation does not maintain a website, Kahle’s personal blog offers insight into the issues in which Kahle is currently interested.
CONTACT:
Kahle-Austin Foundation
513B Simonds Loop
San Francisco, CA 94129
(415) 931-8766
LINKS:
