The Kern Family Foundation is a private, independent grantmaking foundation based in Waukesha, Wisconsin. In keeping with the vision of its founders, Drs. Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern, the Kern Family Foundation seeks to enrich the lives of others by promoting strong pastoral leadership, educational excellence, and high quality, innovative engineering talent.
In practice, the Foundation intentionally focuses on systemic change, rather than charities. It seeks to target funding toward broad impact, long-term programs. The Foundation’s created the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network (KEEN) in 2005 as a collegiate initiative to increase the quantity and quality of U.S. engineering talent. KEEN’s mission is to create an action-oriented, entrepreneurial mindset among engineering, science and technical undergraduates. Values characteristic of the entrepreneurial mindset include vision, passion, creativity, innovation, optimism, opportunity recognition, and persistence.
The KEEN program aims to fulfill this mission by supporting the creation of programs that develop technical leaders with strong skills and an entrepreneurial mindset in undergraduate engineering programs at select private U.S. colleges and universities. This program is built on the conviction that engineering students will make greater contributions to business success if their engineering education includes an effectively integrated entrepreneurship education program.
The Entrepreneurship Program at IIT is pleased to be part of the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network and offers its sincere gratitude and appreciation to the Kern Family Foundation for its generous support. For more information, please visit www.kffdn.org.