Mission & Vision

The Inga Kulberg Tesler Foundation has been established with the dual ambitious goals of (1) eliminating family poverty and (2) improving the lives of families with members suffering from neuroendocrine carcinoma.

We are not naïve and are well aware that both of these massive problems have many non-profits devoted to the same or similar ends. So, Inga’s Foundation intends to take a different approach that marries Inga’s desire to take on massive problems with her no-nonsense realism.

Inga knew that eliminating family poverty and curing cancer are goals that have received billions of dollars and still not been solved. With the old adage in mind that “she who saves one life saves the world,” Inga’s Foundation will tackle these huge problems “one family at a time.” We believe that if we are able to change the course of the lives of one family, we will make a small difference to society at large but a massive difference in the future of the parents and children in that family. We do that once, we make a mark. We do that again and again, and pretty soon we are making a measurable difference with ripple effects across generations.

When Ebenezer Scrooge complained (in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”) to the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley that his chains and torment made no sense because Jacob had been a good businessman. Jacob wailed and cried out, “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!” At Inga’s Foundation, we have adopted the spirit of that message and adopted as our founding vision and guiding principle the fundamental premise that “Mankind Is Our Business”.

Eliminating Family Poverty

Inga was a self-made, successful Silicon Valley executive who immigrated to the United States at a young age and believed you could make your way in this country through hard work, education, training and some occasional help from an extended friendly hand. 

But she did not believe in hand-outs. During her life, she worked with other immigrants to help them get the skills they needed to succeed and she was intensely concerned about families living in poverty who were not being given a fair chance to live the American Dream. In furtherance of her beliefs, one of the two primary goals of Inga’s Foundation will be to assist families living below the poverty line.

Inga worked on the HR side of business and her husband Bob worked on the corporate fundraising side. So, prior to Inga’s death, they decided to put their respective skills to use and hatched the idea to have Inga work the “supply” side and find families living in poverty and then leverage her HR skills to provide training to the parent(s) of that family living below the poverty line. Bob would then build out the “demand” side by cultivating relationships with venture capitalists and their portfolio companies so that once the Foundation had a trained candidate ready for employment, the Foundation would have a network of willing employers. Inga passed away before their charitable idea came into existence, but – in her name – we are now ready to bring her vision to life and start raising people up out of poverty, one family at a time.

Helping Families with NEC

The second central focus of Inga’s Foundation was born out of a desire not to see other families suffer from the rare form of cancer (neuroendocrine carcinoma) that prematurely robbed us of Inga’s life. To that end, Inga’s Foundation also intends to duplicate the “one family at a time” mission by providing meaningful assistance to families where one member is suffering from neuroendocrine carcinoma, or NEC. While we may never be able to raise enough money to cure the disease, we can certainly raise enough funds to help some families have an easier time during their treatments.