A practice, not an institution.

David and Susan Martin met in the early 1980s, both already drawn to the same idea — that the measure of a life is what it makes possible for others. They married in 1985 and built three things in parallel: a family, a business, and a giving practice. David’s company, The Martin Group, would deliver homes for more than twenty thousand California families across sixty cities — work he understood as community-building. Susan, who grew up between continents — Alaska, Indonesia, Libya, Angola, Scotland — brought that worldliness to a career in event planning and a quiet, lifelong philanthropy.

From 2000 to 2008, David served as International Chairman of the Young President’s Organization, with Susan at his side as partner. The role took them to more than seventy countries; the organization doubled its membership during his tenure. What stayed with them were the people. In village squares and boardrooms across the world, they listened, mentored, and put their hands to the work of others. Those relationships became the foundation’s reach today — partners across continents, chosen because someone they trusted had vouched for the work.

They raised three daughters — Kate, Megan, and Annabel — across homes in Piedmont, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles, settling in St. Helena after their youngest left for college. Megan passed away in 2015 — a loss that deepened David and Susan’s commitment to families navigating illness and grief.

The foundation was formalized in 2016, the year that quiet practice was given a structure that could outlast its founders. Susan passed away in 2018; David in 2021. Both at home in St. Helena, surrounded by family — and by the network of friends and partners they had spent four decades building.

Today the foundation is stewarded by Kate and Annabel. Their work continues their parents’ practice: relationships rather than transactions, partners chosen because the family knows them or knows their work, and a clear preference for the close-in, unglamorous labor of helping the people in front of them. Giving spans four areas — Health, Faith & Community, Housing & Hunger, and Education — concentrated across the Bay Area, Napa Valley, and a handful of communities further afield.

The foundation manages roughly $4.3 million in assets and gives approximately five percent each year. Annual giving has grown alongside those assets since 2016, when David and Susan formalized what they had been doing privately for decades.

David and Susan believed that privilege carries responsibility — that those who have built well owe something to the communities that made the building possible. The foundation continues that work alongside the partners who shared it with them.