Shirley Foundation Collection
The UK Philanthropy Archive has been generously supported by Dame Stephanie Shirley, a philanthropist and entrepreneur with a focus on autism research and information technology.
Shirley Foundation Collection
About this collection
Dame Stephanie donated the papers of the Shirley Foundation as our founding collection of the UK Philanthropy Archive.
The archive contain papers relating to the projects funded by the Shirley Foundation, as well as material relating to the strategic direction, governance and administration of the Foundation, and includes both paper and digital files.
This includes:
- Project files (1994-2018)
- Minutes of Trustees Meetings (1996-2018)
- Annual Reports (1997-2018)
- 10 year review of the Shirley Foundation (2006)
- Report on the impact of the Shirley Foundation (2018)
- Speeches given by Dame Stephanie Shirley (1997-2018)
- Press articles and newspaper reports about Dame Stephanie Shirley and the Shirley Foundation
- Publications and reports relating to autism
- Papers relating to the Kingwood Trust
- Papers relating to the National Autism Project 2015-2017
- Papers relating to the Prior’s Court Foundation
This collection is currently partially catalogued – please contact us if you would like more information about the collection at specialcollections@kent.ac.uk.
About the Dame Stephanie Shirley and the Shirley Foundation
Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley was born in Germany in 1933 as Vera Buchthal. Her parents – Arnold Buchthal, a high-court judge, and his Austrian wife Mary – lived in a variety of places in Europe before settling near Vienna in Austria. After arriving in the UK as an unaccompanied child refugee on the Kindertransport in 1939, Dame Stephanie developed a remarkable drive and energy that led her to follow a career in mathematics and computing at a time that was unusual for girls and women.
After experiencing sexism, increasing discrimination against her gender, missed promotions and unwanted sexual advances, Dame Stephanie decided to run her own software company. With £6 initial investment, she founded her company Freelance Programmers from her dining room table. While fairly successful, the company initially experienced difficulty in attracting work. All this changed when Dame Stephanie experimented in signing her business correspondence with the name “Steve” Shirley; her business greatly augmented and she became widely known as Steve from this point onwards.
Freelance Programmers was later known as FI, then Xansa, and was later acquired by Steria now part of the Sopra Steria Group. In 25 years as the Chief Executive, Dame Stephanie developed the company into a leading business technology group which pioneered new work practices and changed the position of professional women along the way.
Dame Stephanie subsequently dedicated her time and resources to projects that she passionately believed in – advocating for women in the workplace and in technology, researching autism and supporting families of autistic children, and developing projects in computing and information technology. Dame Stephanie decided early on in her philanthropic career that she wanted to support funding and research during her lifetime and structured the Shirley Foundation to spend all of its funds by 2018.
Her philanthropy, mainly delivered through the foundation, focussed principally on IT projects and autism research. Dame Stephanie and her husband Derek had one child, a son called Giles who was autistic and had epilepsy, and who sadly passed away in 1998. She set up two autism charities; Priors Court – a school, and Autism at Kingwood – supported living for adults. Realising the need for research to change the future for autistic people, she founded Autistica in 2004, the UK’s first national autism research charity.
The Shirley Foundation spent out in October 2018, having made over £67m in grants over the life of the Foundation.