Shomeric Beacon of Light: Ariel Beery

"I’ve dedicated the past three decades since becoming a madrich in HaShomer Hatzair to building institutions and working with public entities to address challenges facing humanity. None of it, I believe, would have been possible without the education I received by the movement, the permission it gave me to become a Halutz. 

I first experienced that in action after leaving the movement in North America in 1998 and joining a Garin in Israel, on Kibbutz Kerem Shalom, on the border with the Gaza Strip. Together with my Garin, we started an initiative to connect Israeli and Palestinian youth to work on shared challenges. We called it the First of May Project and it introduced me to the idea that one can found a new organization from scratch. 

I returned to the US after my military service in 2002, and attended Columbia University, where I became a student activist to advance the same cause I worked on with my Gazan partners: peaceful coexistence based on the commitment to self-determination. The pushback from professors and the administration to Zionist of even the left-wing kind was immense, and the silence from Jewish organizations troubling. I felt a darkness encroaching on the contemporary Jewish world and founded PresenTense in response, what became a global network of social venture accelerators to launch efforts to address challenges facing the Jewish People and citizens of the State of Israel. 

In 2012 a kvutza-mate of mine, David Levitz, came to me with an idea: how to use the light shone by the newly ubiquitous smartphones as a means of detecting cancer. I moved to the board of PresenTense and became his co-founder in MobileODT, which we grew over 8 years to become a global health technology company helping healthcare workers across Low to Middle Income Countries address the scourge of cervical cancer. 

As COVID19 hit, and our investors decided to sell MobileODT, my commitment to the healthcare providers and systems across the emerging world motivated me to build CoVelocity, a company dedicated to mobilizing innovative technologies to address the needs created by the pandemic. Together with our partners we were able to introduce new diagnostic and therapeutic technologies across the global south to save hundreds of thousands of lives. 

It was when the pandemic cooled off that Israel’s political reality heated up - and since the return of Netanyahu I have dedicated myself to developing new institutions and organizing infrastructure to build a better future for Israel. In many ways, it is a return to my roots - taking the basic lesson I learned on Mosh and practiced over the past three decades to join the Zionist arena once more: when finding oneself in darkness, spark the light."

-Ariel Beery