KDK-Harman Foundation

Jo Ivester is a founding board member of the KDK-Harman Foundation. Her passion for education as a means of fighting poverty goes back to her childhood when her family moved to an impoverished town in rural Mississippi and her mother taught in the local high school. She and her mother have recently completed a book chronicling those experiences entitled From Cotton Fields to Shakespeare: The Mississippi Years, which she is currently seeking to publish. Following a fifteen-year career in the transportation and high tech industries, she began teaching math on a substitute basis at the middle and senior high school level. More recently, Jo has served as an adjunct professor at St. Edward University's undergraduate business school teaching Statistics and Operations Management. Jo received a B.S. in civil engineering from MIT and an M.B.A. from Stanford. She has been married for twenty-nine years and has four children.