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Kathrin Brewer grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area’s rural Marin County, a culturally- rich neighborhood where everyone celebrated everyone else’s traditions; from Sunday School to Bar Mitzvahs to cherry blossom festivals.Brewer developed an understanding of global cultures after traveling in Mexico at age five with her grandfather in a pickup truck without air conditioning, and later living with families in both Mexico and Germany. She became fluent in Spanish and German.
Brewer went on to receive a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984. Her career choices were divided between medical research in Germany and the semiconductor industry in either Austin or Silicon Valley. During a campus interview, the representative for Motorola sold her on Austin by describing a place where she could windsurf in warm water. As part of the interview, she was taken to lunch by a fellow chemical engineering graduate student she had met at Berkeley. “I told my roommate that this guy really convinced me,” Brewer said. While she recounted all the reasons that Austin would be a cool place to live with $4.00 cover charges, $2.50 beers and the opportunity to listen to Doug Sahm at places like Maggie Mae’s, her roommate read between the lines, cautioning that perhaps she shouldn’t choose the job just because the guy sounded like fun. The allure of rapid growth in the semiconductor industry carried the decision, so Brewer took the job. And the guy, too. They married five years later.
In 1987, Brewer joined Advanced Micro Devices and found a way to integrate her professional and personal goals. Gary Heerssen and the leadership were known for a rigorous emphasis on engineering and process principles with an organizational philosophy that developed the capacity of every member of the team. “Achieving AMD goals was the first priority,” said Brewer. “We gave staff the tools and training to develop their own plans and solve problems as a team. I managed projects worth several million dollars and enjoyed the collaboration involved in making things happen.”
She went on to work in a partnership between AMD, Austin Community College and the Capital Area Training Foundation, now Skillpoint Alliance. Brewer set up an internship program that would bring 40 Del Valle and Johnston High School students to AMD for the summer on paid internships. No one had had students in the workplace before, but Brewer eventually sold it up and down the organization. Dual credit technology classes were set up at ACC for the students.
In addition to running a substantial manufacturing program, she was working 40 hours a week on the internship project. Pregnant at the time, complications forced Brewer into bed rest, which provided her with time to reflect about priorities, and proved a turning point. For the next six years, she focused on her daughter Kendall and met a whole new world of people who did exceptional things outside the corporate environment. She embraced this new life and began volunteering in the community with the same passion that had characterized her 9-to-5 work. Among her many accomplishments, she tripled the revenue of the Walk for SafePlace and for the Westminster Preschool. Her new community became Casis Elementary School and her colleagues from Leadership Austin.
After her daughter started school, Brewer decided to return to a full-time career. She had seen the posting on the AISD website for a position with the Austin Partners in Education that had been founded by the Greater Austin Chamber and the Austin Independent School District 26 years earlier as Adopt-a-School. The position offered her the opportunity to realize her passion for education. She began activating connections in her network that included members of the search committee who had worked on the internship project six years earlier. In 2004, she was named executive director for Austin Partners in Education. The organization became a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit entity with a board composed of leaders and representatives from the various segments of the community.
She couldn’t have anticipated a more demanding return to the workplace. During her first month, Brewer was responsible for hiring a full staff, finding a new office, equipping it and building the office systems while preparing to place 3,000 volunteers in the schools. She was tasked with taking the program to the next level, creating measurable changes in student test outcomes that could grow to a scale that would close the achievement gap. While there were some rocky early days, Brewer rose to the challenge, embracing the role and melding her past experiences with her new life.
In 2008, the revolutionary APIE Classroom Coaching program had grown to over 750 volunteers, working with teams of three or four students. They helped increase student passing rates by building learning capacity through caring relationships. This fall, Brewer expects to recruit over 800 Classroom Coaches, by reaching out to public and private partners in the community, tapping Mack Brown as the ‘Head Coach’ for the newly created promotional campaign.
Responsible for expanding flagship programs, Brewer and her staff of 16 continued her mission by creating programs to support students with a focus on under-resourced communities. In co-producing the CommuniCard Feria para Aprender, one of many programs aimed at closing the gap in education, they enabled over 8,000 students and their families to speak with staff and receive program materials in Spanish.
Brewer continues to serve on numerous councils for technology and education around Austin, recruiting volunteers and support for Partners. She loves spending time with family and occasionally indulges in guilty pleasures like reading Cooks Illustrated and The New Yorker cover to cover.
MORE INFO
www.austinpartners.org