Martha Karsh is a graduate of the University of Virginia (1978) and Virginia Law School (1981). She has practiced law, co-founded architectural and design firm Clark & Karsh and, in 2016, published The Beatles A Hard Day’s Night: A Private Archive. Ms. Karsh has served over 13 years on the national board of the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) Foundation, co-chairs the bicentennial “Honor the Future Campaign for the University of Virginia,” is a Trustee Emerita of the University of Virginia Law School Foundation, and sits on the advisory Board for the Institute of Democracy at UVA. She successfully led a $70 million growth campaign for KIPP in Los Angeles. 

Through the Karsh Family Foundation, which Ms. Karsh and Bruce Karsh, her husband of 43 years, founded together in 1998, and which supports education, community and democracy, the Karshes have made over $400 million in gifts and grants.  

At higher education, they have supported financial aid and professorships. They have established major scholarship programs at Duke, the University of Virginia Law School, the University of Pennsylvania, Howard, Spelman, and Brown; two of them are top merit scholarship programs: the Karsh Stem Scholars at Howard and the Karsh-Dillard Scholarships at Virginia Law School. At Duke University, the undergraduate financial aid department is named after the Karshes. They are major supporters of UNCF and, at K-12, of KIPP, Teach for America, and Charter School Growth Fund.

In May 2023, both Bruce and Martha were awarded Honorary Doctorates at Howard University’s 155th commencement ceremony to recognize “25 years of philanthropic support for education in America.” President Joseph Biden gave the commencement address.

In 2016, the Karshes launched the Karsh Social Service Center at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, endowed it in 2019, and expanded its footprint to the Temple’s west campus in 2022. The Karsh Center provides free legal, vision, dental, and other services, as well as a food pantry, for the multicultural immigrant community in and around the Temple neighborhood and beyond.  

 The Karshes endowed Cedars Sinai’s Gastroenterology and Hepatology Division in 2020, supported the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles throughout the pandemic, and they are co-founders of The Painted Turtle, an outdoor camp for children with chronic and life-threatening illnesses. With gifts to the Jewish Federation, the FIDF and the Skirball Cultural Center, the Karshes support the greater Jewish community, both here and in Israel.

In an effort to support and strengthen American democracy, the Karshes founded the Center for Law and Democracy at Virginia Law School in 2018, and the University-wide Institute of Democracy at UVA in 2021. To date, their commitments to the Law School and University for both education and democracy are approximately $100 million.