Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

David Hertz, Who Uses Food For Social Change, Wins $100K Bronfman Prize

(JTA) — David Hertz, a Jewish social entrepreneur from Brazil, was named the winner of the 2019 Charles Bronfman Prize on Wednesday in recognition of his efforts to alleviate global hunger. The award comes with $100,000 in prize money.

Hertz is the cofounder of Gastromotiva, a Brazilian-based organization that fights unemployment and social inequality and uses cooking classes and nutrition education as tools to “create opportunities for those living on the margins of society.”

The Charles Bronfman Prize, established by the children of the philanthropist, honors humanitarians under age 5o “whose innovative work, informed by Jewish values, has significantly improved the world.”

In a statement, Hertz said his 13-year-old group provides “free vocational kitchen training, entrepreneurial classes and nutrition classes across Brazil, El Salvador, South Africa and Mexico.” During the 2016 Rio Olympics, Hertz opened the Refettorio Gastromotiva in collaboration with renowned chef Massimo Botura and journalist Alexandra Forbes as a no-food-waste cooking school and restaurant.

Previous winners of the prize include criminal justice reformer Amy Bach, refugee rights activist Rebecca Heller and Israeli writer Etgar Keret.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.