Nathan’s September 2020 Newsletter
And so it begins,
History in the making, our first newsletter! So much has happened until now and so much more to come. Where do I start.
I first want to welcome you to the Galilee Culinary Institute by Jewish National Fund, the center for immersive culinary experiences, innovation, and excellence. The monthly newsletter will include a behind the scenes look at our progress, challenges, successes, and much more. We will also highlight impactful people, new and exciting products, and lots of innovations. There will be recipes too!
Our goal is to provide periodic updates and showcase some of the most amazing stories from Israel. We hope you enjoy this month’s newsletter, and please send any comments our way so we can improve our future communication with you.
While you can read about what we are up to on the website, I can tell you what we are not looking to do. We are not looking to be another culinary institute and just to improve an existing business model. We want to push the boundaries by innovating and creating a unique one-of-a-kind campus that will produce the culinary leaders of tomorrow while bringing together tourists from all over the world through culinary experiences. Now more than ever, with Covid-19 and the many changes and challenges affecting all industries, we are positioning ourselves to have an immediate impact on culinarians across the globe.
We want to give you a peek into our progress so far. A lot of legal work was done to create the entity, file for permits, and get it started. We finalized our lease agreement on the campus, which is located in the greater Kiryat Shmona region (northern Israel). We worked with many engineers, and architectural renderings were created, and we are looking at opening in either late 2021 or early 2022. We created a brand identity and a strategic marketing plan, and we have already fostered many relationships and received some excellent PR.
Currently, we launched our new site and social media platforms. We are focused on creating our flagship student program in which we are collaborating with top professionals throughout the world. Feel free to fill out our survey and get involved if you are looking to build the GCI with us. We held a Logo Zoom Party with JNF on August 25th and pushed hard to move everything forward during the slower summer months, especially now when there is no international travel.
A little bit about me: I was born and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, the oldest of three siblings, and I had a great childhood. I always knew I wanted to get into impactful work, not knowing exactly what that was. In high school, I decided that business was the best way to make my mark, and I just had to focus on that. I figured that the type of work could be discovered later.
I went to business school at the University of Delaware. I figured that accounting and the language of business and computers were important, so I majored in accounting and minored in management information systems. I started my journey at Ernst & Young (EY) doing auditing and then mergers and acquisitions and received my MBA and CPA while working there. After six years at EY, I left to help a company go public.
While doing all that, I was figuring out what type of work I was interested in and started in the health arena. Exercising and eating well were always important to me, and so I decided to venture into the wellness world. I received my personal trainers’ certification, lifestyle and weight management certification, TRX, and others. I had some goals in the corporate world, and once I accomplished those, I decided it was time to jump into entrepreneurial work.
I will not bore you with the rest of the details, but a summarized version is that I moved to Arizona and lived with my younger brother, worked on some startups, and did some consulting work. While there, I got married, learned about JNF through JNF Futures, helped start the Arizona group, and then made Aliyah to Israel with Nefesh B’Nefesh. My wife and I agreed that no matter where we go, we needed to impact that specific area. When we arrived in Israel, this is what we were looking to do.
While networking, I saw Russell Robinson, CEO of JNF, and told him that if he had any impactful work in the North, let me know. That was the beginning of the conversation, and after some time, I talked with him again and met our amazing co-founder Lior Lev Sercarz. We agreed it was time to get the GCI started, and I officially began the GCI journey in May of 2019.
It’s hard to contain my excitement in helping to build such a meaningful project in the north of Israel, but I’m hoping you will all join me on this journey. Until next time.
Nathan Hoffman