Point Foundation (environment)

For other uses, see Point Foundation (disambiguation).

The POINT Foundation was a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco and founded by Stewart Brand and Dick Raymond.^[1] POINT was established in 1971, for the role of distributing funds deriving from profits of the Whole Earth Catalogs to innovative and promising ventures.^[1]

POINT Foundation

Company type	Nonprofit
Founder	Stewart Brand and Dick Raymond
Headquarters	San Francisco, California , United States of America

The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), was an American magazine and product catalog.^[2] The content was intended to empower readers; a user-review format was employed to introduce products in the Catalog's pages.

The POINT foundation's board members were united by concern for the natural environment. Besides Brand and Raymond, board members included computer engineer Bill English, who became the co-inventor of the computer mouse, and Huey Johnson, former western-regional director of the Nature Conservancy.^[1] One of POINT's first large grants, in 1972, enabled a group of environmental scientists, activists, and Native Americans to attend the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm.^[3]: 57

Besides distributing funds, POINT took over publication of the WEC from its original publisher, the Portola Institute by 1980, when the publication had swelled to a 452-page edition. As well, the foundation published a number of mostly periodical offshoots of the WEC.^[1] POINT was also a co-owner of an early online discussion platform titled The WELL.^[4]