Stacy Schusterman

Origins and early life

Stacy Helen Schusterman was born around 1963, the daughter of the oilman Charles Schusterman, founder of Samson Resources, and of Lynn Schusterman, with whom he started the family foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1987. After a year in Israel in the early 1980s she graduated from Yale University and went on to take an MBA at the University of Texas at Austin.

Work and career

In 1991 she co-founded the commercial real estate firm Granite Properties, and from 2000 to 2011 she ran the family's oil and gas company, Samson Resources, until its sale to a group led by KKR for 7.2 billion dollars. She joined her mother as co-chair of the family foundation in 2015 and became its chair in 2018, when Lynn Schusterman became chair emerita. Schusterman Family Philanthropies now gives more than 400 million dollars a year in the United States and Israel, and by 2026 the family had invested more than 3.5 billion dollars over three decades.

Its Jewish work runs through BBYO, Hillel, Moishe House and Repair the World and through Birthright, which the family helped to found, and in Israel through the Haruv Institute, which trains professionals to address child abuse and neglect.

Recognition

In 2022 she and her mother received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, and that year the family helped the Israeli Foreign Ministry to build a field hospital during the war in Ukraine. Her Jewish identity is stated in her own words: our Jewish values have always been, and will always be, at the core of our family's philanthropy, she wrote, naming the pursuit of justice, tzedek, the repair of the world, tikkun olam, and respect for all, derekh eretz.

In May 2026 TIME named her and her mother among the hundred most influential people in philanthropy, describing causes rooted in their Jewish faith, from education to prison reform.