• Ron Yeffet is setting a one-year working standard for his teams across real estate, energy, and infrastructure projects, with specific commitments on planning time, local partnership, and community follow-through.

Why now

Florida, USA, Oct 07, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE — Ron Yeffet has managed and owned projects across the United States, Israel, Italy, and Africa for more than two decades. Over that time, he has watched the same pattern repeat: projects that skip early groundwork tend to cost more later, in money and in trust.

This year, Ron Yeffet is putting a name to the standard his teams already work toward. It is not a new company or a new division. It is a public commitment to three practices he expects on every project his enterprise touches over the next twelve months, from concrete superstructures in New York to power plant and roadway work in Africa.

The three commitments

Longer planning windows before any ground is broken. Ron Yeffet has said that the biggest project delays he has seen rarely start on site. They start months earlier, in decisions made too fast. His standard calls for extended review periods on permitting, energy supply, and site logistics before construction begins, even when that means a slower public start date.

Local partnership on every cross-border project. Ron Yeffet’s work in the Balkans, where he helped establish Or Itzhak in both Albania and Thessaloniki, shaped how he thinks about building outside his home market. He has carried that lesson into his infrastructure and energy work in Africa: no project moves forward without local partners who understand the community it will serve. That is now a stated requirement, not an informal preference.

A community check-in after project completion. Most developers consider a project finished when it is occupied or operational. Ron Yeffet’s standard adds a step: a follow-up review, roughly a year after completion, to check whether the project is functioning the way the community around it needs. This applies to roadways, power infrastructure, and buildings alike.

What this looks like in practice

“A power plant or a roadway doesn’t succeed just because it turns on or opens,” Ron Yeffet said. “It succeeds if the people living near it are better off five years later. That’s a different question, and it needs a different kind of planning.”

He has pointed to his honorary role as Council for Senegal in Israel as an example of how relationships outlast any single project. “You don’t build the same way in a country you’ll only visit once as you do in one where you intend to keep showing up,” he said. “The second way takes longer. It also holds up.”

Ron Yeffet has been direct about the tradeoff. Extended planning windows and local partnership requirements can slow down a project’s public timeline. He argues that the alternative, moving fast and fixing problems after the fact, costs more in the long run.

“I’d rather explain a longer schedule at the start than explain a failure at the end,” he said. “One of those conversations is uncomfortable. The other one is permanent.”

Where the standard applies

The commitment covers Ron Yeffet’s active work in real estate development, energy supply, and power plant and roadway infrastructure. It applies across the geographies where his enterprise currently operates, including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Israel, Italy, and multiple countries in Africa.

Ron Yeffet has framed the standard as ongoing rather than tied to a single project cycle. His team will apply it to work already in progress as well as new commitments taken on this year.

What comes next

Ron Yeffet has said he expects to revisit and refine these commitments as projects move through their first year under the new standard. He has not set a fixed review date, but he has said the community check-in requirement will be the first piece he tracks closely, since it is the newest addition to how his teams operate.

“The planning and the partnerships, we’ve been doing those for years,” he said. “The follow-up after the fact is the part I want to get right this time.”

To read more, visit the website here.

About Ron Yeffet

Ron Yeffet is President and an entrepreneur and real estate developer based in Miami, Florida. Originally from Jerusalem, Israel, he has managed and owned development, energy, and infrastructure projects across the United States, Israel, Italy, and Africa for more than 25 years. He was elected Honorary Council for Senegal in Israel and has worked to build Jewish communal life in the Balkans, including the establishment of Or Itzhak in Albania and Thessaloniki.

• Education researcher Fahim Billah lays out what he expects first-generation and immigrant students to face in the coming year, and why he thinks the bigger problem is no longer getting in the door.

A Shift From Access to Affordability

Nevada, USA, Oct 07, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE — Fahim Billah, an independent education researcher and consultant based in Reno, Nevada, spends most of his time studying how first-generation and immigrant students move through higher education. For years, he says, the conversation in his field centered on access: who gets admitted, who gets recruited, who even applies.

That conversation is changing.

“Getting a student admitted was never the hardest part,” Billah says. “The harder part is what happens after. The next year is going to make that more obvious, not less.”

He expects the coming year to put more pressure on students after they arrive on campus, through costs that have little to do with tuition.

The Costs That Come After Enrollment

Billah has spent much of his research looking past the headline price of a degree. He points to housing, course materials, transportation, and the income a student gives up by attending school instead of working full time.

“A scholarship that covers tuition can still leave a student short,” he says. “Families who haven’t been through this before often don’t know to ask about those other costs until they’re already a problem.”

He expects more students from first-generation and immigrant families to feel this pressure over the next year, particularly those who do not have a parent or older sibling who can tell them what to expect.

“The students who struggle most aren’t always the ones with the least money,” Billah says. “Sometimes they’re the ones with the least information about where the money actually needs to go.”

Where Mentorship Still Matters

Billah’s work has convinced him that mentorship remains one of the more practical responses to this gap, even as costs and systems grow more complicated.

He has provided informal mentorship to students navigating higher education, often focused on the kind of practical questions that rarely come up in official orientation sessions: how financial aid actually gets disbursed, what a course add-and-drop deadline really means, how to ask a professor for help without feeling embarrassed about it.

“A mentor can’t fix a family’s finances,” Billah says. “But a mentor can make sure a student isn’t blindsided by something that someone with more experience would have caught early.”

He expects demand for this kind of informal support to grow over the coming year, especially in communities where institutions are stretched thin and formal advising is harder to access.

What Grassroots Support Can Still Do

Billah has also directed part of his own time and resources toward smaller, grassroots efforts, including scholarship contributions, books, and learning materials for students who need them. He is open about the fact that this support is modest in scale compared to large institutional programs.

He argues that modest support still matters, particularly when it reaches a student at the right moment.

“A small contribution that covers a textbook or a bus pass can matter more than people expect,” Billah says. “It’s not about the size of the gift. It’s about whether it solves the problem the student actually has.”

Over the next year, he expects more of this kind of support to come from individuals and small community groups rather than large institutions, simply because smaller efforts can move faster and respond to specific, immediate needs.

A Quieter Kind of Pressure

Billah is careful not to describe the coming year as a crisis. He describes it instead as a continuation of pressures that have been building for some time, now becoming harder to ignore.

“None of this is new,” he says. “What’s changing is that more people are starting to notice it, because the costs are showing up in places people didn’t expect to look.”

He plans to keep his research focused on the period after enrollment, the stretch of a student’s education that he believes gets far less attention than the admissions process that precedes it.

“Getting a student into a classroom is one kind of success,” Billah says. “Helping them stay there, and finish, is a different one. That’s the part I think about most.”

To read more, visit the website here.

About Fahim Billah

Fahim Billah is an independent education researcher, educator, and consultant based in Reno, Nevada. His work focuses on first-generation and immigrant students, educational access, and the relationship between education and economic opportunity. Alongside his research and consulting, Billah supports students through mentorship, educational resources, and small-scale scholarship contributions.