Dr. Tomer Malchi, Co-Founder and CEO of CultivAid, has been named the 2026 Prize Laureate of The Charles Bronfman Prize. The award, which comes with a $100,000 prize, recognizes visionary leaders whose work is rooted in Jewish values and delivers meaningful, measurable impact in the world.
In December, Malchi received a phone call from Charles Bronfman himself. He said he was both surprised and excited — he had submitted his application in August and made the finalist round, but still didn’t expect to win.
“The work that we’ve been doing is something that we put our heart into,” said Malchi. “And we do the work for the sake of the work. We don’t get a lot of press about our work, we don’t do a lot of media. So to get recognized, especially by someone like Charles Bronfman, it’s a huge honor for me and for the organization. It’s well deserved, I have to say.”
The Charles Bronfman Prize was founded in 2004 by Charles Bronfman’s children, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman along with their spouses Andrew Hauptman and Claudine Blondin Bronfman, to honor Charles on his 70th birthday, and it recognizes one Jewish humanitarian leader under 50 each year. Malchi’s selection was led by the newly appointed co-executive directors of the prize, Emily Kane Miller and Avital Ferd.
“The last few years have reminded us that we can’t control the world, but we can refuse to be diminished by it. We’re proud to steward a prize that celebrates the breadth and brilliance of Jewish leadership worldwide, particularly right now,” Kane Miller and Ferd said in a statement. “Tomer embodies everything this Prize stands for and is exactly the kind of laureate this moment calls for. We’re honored to have him as the first of our tenure.”
Born in Israel, Malchi was six years old when his family relocated to Monsey, New York. He earned a degree in Industrial Labor Relations from Cornell University before returning to Israel at 26, driven by a mission to tackle the interconnected crises of agriculture, water and nutrition on a global scale. He went on to earn his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD from the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Since the age of 18, Malchi had been immersed in volunteerism and international development, guided by a foundational belief that sustainable development is built through systems, not projects. In 2013, he traveled to Ethiopia through Engineers Without Borders-Israel to help establish a sustainable farm. By 2016, he had co-founded CultivAid alongside Ben Cohen and Yair Keinan.
Today, CultivAid operates with a staff of nearly 100 across Tel Aviv, Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia, with an annual budget of approximately $3.5 million. Its model integrates research and development, farmer training and market-driven value chains into a single, self-sustaining system. For every $100,000 invested, CultivAid generates at least $500,000 in local revenue, and every farmer it works with sees yields increase more than fivefold.
“This honor validates CultivAid’s decade of work and empowers us to expand our model and unlock economic opportunity and sustainable food security for millions of people,” said Malchi.
This is only the beginning for Malchi and CultivAid. Now a father of two living near Tel Aviv, Malchi plans to put the $100,000 prize toward expanding CultivAid’s operations in Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia, a region home to 150 million people living in extreme poverty and a population expected to double by 2050 — continuing to strengthen the relationship between Israel and African countries.
For Malchi, the recognition is less a capstone than a catalyst. “If we have the ability to help others,” he said, “we have the responsibility to deliver.”
