Selection Committee:
Tara Mohr, Chair
Sam Ball
Susan R. Diamond
Jim Heeger
Toby Rubin
Howard Zack

Readers:
Gary S. Cohn
Bethany Hornthal
Shira Levine
Laura Scher

Sam Ball

Sam Ball produces and directs documentaries for Citizen Film, a non-profit organization devoted to creating character-driven documentaries in collaboration with civic and cultural institutions. Over the past ten years, Citizen has produced or co-produced more than 50 portraits of community leaders, social entrepreneurs and artists. These productions range from one-hour documentaries for broadcast to short profiles for dissemination on the web. Jewish-subject documentaries under Ball’s direction have been featured at America’s most prestigious venues for independent film, ranging from the Sundance Film Festival to the Museum of Modern Art – New York.

Ball is currently finishing a film on Algerian-Jewish cartoonist Joann Sfar, and he’s in the midst of directing a film on Yiddish music’s power-couple, Chana and Yosl Mlotek. Most recently, Ball, Playwright Corey Fischer and Jewish Theater director Aaron Davidman received grants from the Creative Work Fund, and the Gerbode and Hewlett Foundations to co-create a mixed-media piece about the need for collaborative art during troubled economic times. In 2001, Ball launched the New Jewish Filmmaking Project (NJFP) – a groundbreaking community storytelling project - thanks to a Joshua Venture Fellowship for Social Entrepreneurs. Produced by Citizen Film for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the NJFP is currently engaged in a digital storytelling experiment at the intersection of documentary and emerging social media technologies.

Gary is the Assistant Director for American Technion Society, the fundraising arm for the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Gary also serves on the Board of Directors of the American Red Cross-Bay Area and the Finance Committee of the United Way of the Bay Area. From 1990-2007, Gary was the Executive Director of Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco and a former board member of the San Francisco Food Bank and Bentley School.

Susan R. Diamond is a real estate and land use attorney associated with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, LLP. In addition she teaches a course in real estate law at Stanford University Law School. Sue received her law degree from Harvard. She is nearing the end of her term as President of the Jewish Community Center-San Francisco and is a Vice-President of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco.

Jim Heeger

Jim Heeger has held a number of high tech senior management positions in Silicon Valley over the past twenty five years. Most recently he was President, CEO and Chairman of PayCycle, the leader in on-line payroll for small businesses. PayCycle was acquired by Intuit in 2009. Prior to PayCycle he held executive management positions at Adobe Systems and Intuit and was President and CEO of Fotiva. Before joining Intuit, Jim held a number of positions at Hewlett-Packard. He earned an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and a BS in management from MIT.

Jim is active in the Jewish community in the Bay Area and is a Past President of Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills. He has served on the Federation Allocation Committee for the South Peninsula. He is currently Vice President of Hillel at Stanford and serves on the Executive Board of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. Jim is currently chair of the Master Planning Committee for URJ’s Camp Newman in Santa Rosa. Jim’s wife, Daryl Messinger, was most recently a principal at a San Francisco-based communications consulting firm, Weisscomm Partners. She is also active in the Bay Area Jewish community. Both their children, Adam and Robbie, are undergraduate students at USC. 

Bethany Hornthal is a communications and marketing strategist who has worked for clients in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors. Bethany is currently working on a variety of projects at UCSF, including advising members of the faculty and staff at the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center and working as an Account Manager for a new partnership developed between Safeway Corporation and the Breast Care Center. Bethany's work in the for-profit sector has included serving as an Advertising Agency Account Executive for A&W Beverages. She has also provided communications consulting services to a number of Silicon Valley companies. Bethany is the immediate past-President of the Jewish Community Center-San Francisco and just completed her leadership of the nationwide executive search for a new JCCSF executive director.

Shira Levine is a marketing consultant, matchmaker and parent living in Oakland. After graduating from the Kellogg Graduate School of Business in 1999, Shira moved to the Bay Area to work at eBay, where she held many roles in both consumer and business marketing and management. After leaving eBay, Shira served as the Community Marketing Director for Prosper.com and as a marketing consultant for Bay Area startups and for the Jewish Community Federation. You can find her terrific dating advice and matchmaking services online at www.superyenta.com.

From 2003 – 2008, Shira was a Board Member of American Jewish World Service (AJWS) and San Francisco Jewish Community Federation’s Young Adult Division. She participated in leadership programs with the American Jewish Committee, AIPAC, and the Jewish Community Center. She is an immediate past participant in the Wexner Heritage Fellowship. She is a current board member of the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation. She lives in Oakland with her husband, Dan Halperin, a renewable energy executive and board member of the American Jewish Committee, and their sons Gabriel and Elan.

Tara Mohr is Chair of the Selection Committee and Chair of the UpStart Board of Directors . 

Laura co-founded Working Assets in 1985 on the belief that building a business and building a better world are not mutually exclusive. Under Laura's leadership, Working Assets has grown to more than $100 million in annual revenue and donated over $65 million to progressive nonprofit groups like Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Watch, Rainforest Action Network and Oxfam America. Working Assets is the parent company of CREDO Mobile, CREDO Long Distance and CREDO Action. Laura also devotes time to helping shape the next generation of social entrepreneurs and leaders. She teaches "Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship" to Stanford University undergraduates and has co-authored chapters in several inspirational books, including The Business of Changing the World, edited by Marc Benioff; and Hands On! 33 More Things Every Girl Should Know, edited by Suzanne Harper. Laura serves on the boards of eScrip, SalesForce.com's Foundation and the Rosenberg Foundation, and on the advisory board of the Yale School of Management. Laura received a bachelor's degree in economics from Yale University and studied international economics at the Institute for International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. Laura lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, daughter and son. She enjoys traveling internationally with her family. 

Toby Rubin is CEO and Founder of UpStart Bay Area.

Howard Zack

A former Procter & Gamble Brand Manager with a deep understanding of consumer markets, Howard has mounted successive careers in commercial real estate development and technology. He introduced Factory Outlet retailing to Northern California, as the co-developer of Six Sixty Third Center in San Francisco and he later ran Kensington Technology’s $50MM computer accessory division. An inveterate entrepreneur, Howard co founded QuickATM, a leading provider of Internet kiosks at airports nationwide, subsequently sold to a NASDAQ firm and he also co-founded Basement.com, an Idealab-backed pioneer of online reverse auctioneering for consumer products. He has been a very active angel investor for years.

Throughout his business career, Howard has sustained community leadership, principally in the Jewish community, locally and nationally. He has served on the Boards of the SF Jewish Community Federation, the SF JCC, The Jewish Community High School and Brandeis Hillel Day School. He was the President of Joshua Venture, a VC-like 501 C-3 which recruited and funded young social entrepreneurs. Presently, he is on the Board of Northern California AIPAC, the Capital Planning Committee of the Federation and Co-Chairs Congregation Kol Shofar’s New Building and Capital Campaign committees. Howard is a graduate of the Wexner Heritage Fellowship program, a former Wexner Leadership Liaison and a former member of UJA’s Young Leadership Cabinet. In addition, he serves on the Board of Advisors of the Center for Investigative Reporting. He holds a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.