The Quiet Pipeline

There is a version of the college extracurricular economy that everyone knows: the consulting club that builds decks for a local bakery, the investment club that paper-trades the S&P, the pre-professional society whose main product is a LinkedIn line. TAMID Group is a different animal, and the thing that makes it different is also the thing most students miss on a first pass at its website: the counterparty is real. When a TAMID team at Wake Forest or Tulane or NYU Shanghai runs a market-entry analysis, there is an Israeli founder on the other end of the Zoom who intends to use it. When a TAMID Fellow lands at Ben Gurion in June, there is a company in Tel Aviv that has interviewed her, chosen her, and budgeted a lunch stipend. That structural fact — a permanent supply of live problems from a small, dense, unusually export-oriented startup economy — is the engine underneath everything else the organization does. The scale, as TAMID publishes it in August 2026, is roughly four thousand active student members across fifty-eight chapters, more than eleven thousand alumni since 2008, and 1,633 students who have completed the summer Fellowship in Israel since the first cohort in 2010. Chapters collectively run more than two hundred consulting projects every semester. The organization itself is small — a $3.5 million nonprofit in its 2024 fiscal year, with 92% of that coming from philanthropy — which makes the reach-to-budget ratio one of the more striking things about it. Here is what the network looks like, how it got built, who pays for it, and how a student gets inside it. 1. Origins: a fix for a campus problem, not an Israel program The founding story is worth knowing because it explains the organization’s entire personality. In 2007, two University of Michigan undergraduates, Sasha Gribov and Eitan Ingall, noticed something uncomfortable about Israel programming on campus: most of their classmates weren’t interested. The available on-ramps were political or cultural, and to a business-minded nineteen-year-old with a finance recruiting timeline, neither was compelling. Rather than argue that students should care, Gribov and Ingall changed the product. They proposed a club built around Israel’s economy — something a student could put on a résumé and defend in an interview. Garrett Levenbrook joined them, and the three recruited a first membership class, which they called the "aleph" cohort. Ingall spent the summer of 2008 developing the venture as a fellow at PresenTense, a Jerusalem social-venture incubator. The first consulting projects ran in 2009. The first Fellows landed in Israel in 2010. Expansion beyond Michigan began in 2011, and by 2013 a group of philanthropists, alumni, and student leaders had formed the advisory board that became the organization’s governing body and hired its first full-time staff. TAMID connects our students to Israel only through non-divisive means: experiential business education. — TAMID Group