David Baker, president of DB Biopharma Consulting LLC, has been working with the Philadelphia Israel Chamber of Commerce for 12 years. Earlier this month, the organization announced that he has been elected as its president.
“I’ve been an executive vice president for the last couple years, and our immediate past president Tiffany Starr McKever’s term was coming up. Folks asked if I would be willing to step up, and my view is that there’s never been a more important time to support Israel and Israeli business, so I was willing,” Baker said.
Baker will serve a two-year term as president of the organization, which he described as a group that “loves Philadelphia, loves Israel and loves business.”
The Philadelphia Israel Chamber of Commerce is a nonprofit network that looks to advance business relationships between those in the Greater Philadelphia area and Israel. The organization serves as the exclusive representative of the Pennsylvania, Delaware and southern New Jersey areas for the BIRD Foundation, an organization that provides grants for collaboration between Israeli and American organizations.
The PICC also holds networking events and educational programming and lobbies on behalf of Israeli organizations in the Philadelphia area.
“We kind of see ourselves as ambassadors for the Philadelphia business community. We try to convince Israeli businesses, ‘Hey, I know you want to come to the U.S.; you’re probably thinking of New York or Boston or San Francisco; but think about Philadelphia,’” Baker said. “We don’t do it alone; we work in partnership with a number of local business organizations and governmental entities.”
Baker said that the last few years have been especially challenging for Israeli businesses.
“After Oct. 7 and the aftermath, it’s been challenging for Israel. Not just everything you hear about living there, but people running businesses,” Baker said. “How challenging it is to run a business when you’re being called up on reserve duty, and with all the vilification of Israel, I just feel like Israel needs our support.”
Baker said that he is in contact with a handful of business people in Israel who give him updates on their situation. He knows of one business owner who runs his own consulting business while also serving in the Israel Defense Forces reserves. In the past, he would lose contact with Baker for weeks at a time while serving. While that type of challenge might have cleared up a bit, others are still present.
“I think a lot of those challenges, of people being called up, or their clients being called up, have started to subside. On the other hand, if I go back to my friend Zev and what he’s experienced, he’s also told me about the fact that as he’s been looking to gain business [it’s been hard],” Baker said. “He was on a call with a company that was in Europe, and he was talking with them, and when they realized that he was in Israel, they were kind of cold, and so I think the vilification of Israel and the anti-Zionism has continued to make it challenging for those businesses.”
In the two years that Baker will serve as head of the PICC, he hopes to create more events for the members of the network to engage each other, as well as grow the membership of the organization. The PICC lost some membership during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he hopes to be able to gain more individual and corporate members on its road back to pre-pandemic norms.
His largest goal, however, is to continue to advocate for Israeli business interests in the Philadelphia area. That, he said, will help the economies of both Israel and Philadelphia.
“We want to communicate even more information about doing business with Israel,” Baker said. “I’d also like to see us bring in more Israeli companies as members of PICC, and try and get more Israeli companies to establish their U.S. operational headquarters in the Philadelphia region.”
For Baker, this is the chance to work toward a goal that matters to him professionally and personally.
“I’m at a point in my career where I feel like I need to do things I’m passionate about, and I think we need to be doing as much as we can to support Israel. I’m a business person by background, so the best way for me to provide that support is something related to business,” he said.