Title: Founder and former CEO, UpStart Communications
Date: March 22, 2016

Toby Rubin is the Founder and former CEO of UpStart - an accelerator in the Bay Area. Her first career began as a civil rights attorney in Mississippi, advocating on behalf of students with disabilities in education matters. She continued this work in her own practice when she moved to San Francisco in 1981. At the end of eight years of litigation that included a favorable 8-0 decision of the Rehnquist led U.S. Supreme Court, Ms. Rubin embarked on a second "career" in non-profit lay leadership. She rose to hold the President or Vice-President position in 8 local and national Jewish and secular non-profits. She is especially proud of her leadership of the San Francisco based Federation's community-wide Teen Initiative that transformed teen professionals and programming around the bay area.

In 2002, Toby joined the Bureau of Jewish Education (BJE)​ staff to direct the ti-ke-a Fellowship for Educators of Jewish teens. While there​, Toby conceived and established two groundbreaking projects for the Bay Area: the Jewish Service Learning Project, (dedicated to helping Jewish community professionals integrate service learning into their program mix) and the Jewish Professionals Co-op, the precursor to UpStart. From 2006-2008, Toby served as Associate Director of the BJE.
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Ms. Rubin holds a Juris Doctor from the University of San Diego School of Law, a Bachelor degree in political sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and​ is a graduate of the Wexner Heritage Fellowship.​