The Klarman Family Foundation

Margot Stern was born on November 10, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois to Fan and Lloyd Stern. After the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, she was exposed to the racism facing Black people and the intolerance that extended to her small Jewish community. “One Jewish cheerleader at a time was the custom on our high school squad. We had Jewish high school sororities, and one Jew a year was chosen as an honorary member of a Christian sorority. We all lived by these rules.”

After graduating from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she became a teacher, starting out in Skokie, Illinois, and eventually moving with her husband Terry Strom and their young family to the Boston suburbs, where she taught eighth grade language arts and social studies. In the spring of 1975, she and fellow teacher Bill Parsons attended a workshop on the Holocaust and realized how little they taught the subject and how little their students knew about the genocide of Jews during World War II. They went on to secure both interest and funding from local philanthropists and educators to expand her lesson plans into a curriculum used in classrooms around the country.

In 1976, Margot co-founded Facing History & Ourselves, drawing on the pain of her Jewish childhood in the Jim Crow South to create one of the most widely used Holocaust education programs in American schools. 

As an educator, Margot believed her students had the capacity to think deeply about history and how choices shape society. Margot imbued in them the ability to act as moral philosophers and apply the lessons they learned in class to the world around them.

During the nearly forty years Strom spent as head of the nonprofit until her retirement in 2014, its curriculum expanded into classrooms in all fifty states and in more than 100 countries.

Margot taught us all to be upstanders, not bystanders, and to listen to the voices of young people as agents of change.