Khib Kugler

What we talked about

A name nobody would explain

He grew up moving constantly, which meant being the new kid every time a teacher called roll. It would go Sally, Tom, Jim, Mary, and then a pause. He would go home and ask his parents where his name came from, and they told him it was made up.

On his twenty-fifth birthday, his father handed him a card. Folded inside were wrinkled, yellowed pages torn from a field notebook, with the story of his name written on them. His father had written on the card that he had been carrying those pages in his wallet for twenty-five years, and that now only the two of them knew. His mother had never been told.

Two months before he was born

His father was the only scientist aboard a ship in the South Pacific, with a crew of ten islanders and an Australian captain. Six weeks at sea, and the two of them traded life stories. His father came off that ship so moved by what he had heard that when his son was born weeks later, he told his wife the name was decided.

The captain was William Thomas Kelly Howard. His father took the KH from that name and combined it with IB, a word he understood to mean I exist, I am here — not a claim to be anyone else, but a daily reminder to seize the day because being here at all is luck.

Then he stops. There is a cliffhanger in Captain Bill’s story and he is not giving it away, because he is writing the book. He started in 2022, hit a research wall he could not get past, and only broke through last year when the family met some of the captain’s descendants in Australia. He works on it almost every day.

The other Khib, in Papua New Guinea

His father did a doctoral dissertation on the geology of Papua New Guinea and spent nine months a year in the jungle mapping it. Years later the son did his own master’s field season in the same country, on a National Science Foundation grant, based in a village on the southern coast with a Catholic mission.

Nothing could be surveyed without the chief’s permission, so the first night was introductions. The chief’s eldest son and his pregnant wife shook hands with the two students. Unknown to anyone in the room, she went into labor at that moment, and the boy born the next morning was named after the classmate whose hand she had shaken.

When they left, he gave the family his Polaroid camera and all the spare film, and for years he mailed film every Christmas and got photographs back. Two or three years in, an envelope arrived with pictures of a baby named for him. Then the letters stopped and no one at the mission could tell him why.

Around 2020, that child found him on Facebook. They are Facebook friends now. He says he has never been brave enough to ask what happened.

A stranger sent to appraise the art

The family story runs through his grandfather, a Kansas City butcher whose son decided he did not want to be a butcher, studied hard, and got to university on an athletic scholarship. A visiting professor from the University of Tasmania offered him a doctorate, so he followed him to Hobart, where he met the woman he married. Their first son was born there.

Field work in New Guinea turned into a collection of tribal art — shields, totems, bows and arrows, human skulls. When the family relocated to Kansas City, all of it arrived and went into his grandparents’ garage, and his grandparents wanted it gone. So his father called the Kansas City Art Institute to ask whether any of it was worth anything.

They sent two people out to look: a prominent local professor and artist, Jim Leedy, and a supporter of the arts community named Harrison Jedel. He was about six years old, excited mainly because his father was excited. That was 1968 or early 1969.

Fifty years later, the same family

That afternoon turned into a family friendship, then a business relationship, then a partnership in oil and gas exploration and production. In 2011 Harrison Jedel established a foundation so that his estate would pass into it. He had no direct descendants. He wrote a deliberately strong charter to direct the grantmaking after he was gone, and he named five trustees: three trusted family friends and business partners, and two cousins.

Jedel died in 2016 and the foundation became active. His father was one of the original trustees. When his father died in 2018, he stepped into the role himself. The through line is Jedel’s conviction that education is the best way to advance in life and that everyone deserves equal access to it, which is still the filter the foundation grants through.

Geology, and the company winding down

His own career was oil and gas. He is a geologist and geophysicist, spent several years at Texaco, and left in 2000 to join the family company, where he has worked ever since. He mentions almost in passing that they are currently winding that company down — a quiet detail that explains why philanthropy is now what takes up his time.

Raising the next generation of givers

The most practical thing he describes is how his own children learn to give. Each of them is allocated funds every year and has to go find a cause they care about that fits inside the foundation’s charter and where a grant would actually make a difference. They do the finding. That is the training.

His observation about the sector is that a lot of newer foundations have not thought at all about what happens when the next generation takes over. Several Central Texas foundations are first-generation moving into second, which is why Giving Generation ATX exists, and why he mentors in it.

Two young women and a tour of the Ann Richards School

In 2018, two fellow trustees asked him to help seed an all-girls charter school in Kansas City. To model it, they came to Austin to visit the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders. He had lived in Austin since 1980 and knew exactly who Ann Richards was, but had never set foot in the school.

Two students gave them the tour. They were so composed and so plainly at home in the building — knowing every person they passed in the hall, across every grade from sixth up — that at the end of the day he complimented the principal on picking the right two. She told him they pick two at random.

He says that floored him, and it is the reason the foundation has funded the school ever since: biomedical pathways programming, the makerspace, and a summer abroad program that sends three young women overseas between their sophomore and junior years. He watched four alumnae of that program at the seniors’ Reaching for the Stars gala the Friday before this interview.

Why he keeps moving the money earlier

The foundation also funds Breakthrough Central Texas, which mentors students aiming to be the first in their family to attend college — from sixth grade all the way through their post-secondary degree — and the Austin Ed Fund, the philanthropic arm of Austin ISD, where he sits on the board and where teachers can apply for classroom innovation grants.

But his own thinking has shifted earlier. Watching a first-generation student reach college is rewarding, and he still calls it something close to a bandage. If a child can be given a solid base to build on instead, that feels better to him. So the grant he is now pushing is early childhood literacy and numeracy, aimed at getting young students to grade level before third grade testing, because his read is that falling behind early is a hole almost nobody climbs out of.

A funder’s frustration with Texas

He offers one genuine grievance. By his account, Texas would rank as one of the largest economies in the world on its own, runs a balanced budget, and collects enormous tax revenue, particularly from oil and gas — and still lands near the bottom third of the fifty states on education funding and results. For a state as proud as this one, he finds that hard to square.

Why he started the Central Texas Funder Network

His fellow trustees in Kansas City kept describing something he did not see happening in Austin: foundations talking to each other, sharing what they had learned, and building grants together instead of separately. So he helped start the Central Texas Funder Network to create that room here. It got going through the pandemic and finished its first full year recently.

The urgency he attaches to it is blunt. Government has pulled back funding from programs that communities depend on, and philanthropy cannot backfill that on its own. It will take money and it will take people, including people who only have time to give.

The perspective from having no roots

Asked what Americans misunderstand, he doubts most people think about Papua New Guinea at all. What he does say is that it is easy here to live inside one community and treat anything outside it as suspect. Having spent time in Russia and the former Soviet states, Nigeria, North Africa and New Guinea, his conclusion is that everyone wants the same short list: safety, shelter, food, and children who do at least as well as they did.

He calls having no roots the downside of that childhood, and then says he has them now anyway. The family has been in Austin since 1980, his children came up through the same school system he did, and he has known their classmates’ parents since day one.