Joel Rubin

Joel has served as the Executive Director of the Illinois Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers for approximately 25 years and brings a wealth of nonprofit management and fundraising experience to the Board. In addition, he has been active in Chicago’s Jewish community for many decades, having worked at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, as well as at the American Jewish Congress, where he was its Midwest Director from 1995 to 1999.

A graduate of the Wexner Heritage Fellow Leadership Program, Joel is also an adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Social Work.

Joel graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he received his bachelor’s degree in comparative politics, and earned his MSW from the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He spent most of the 1980s living in Israel, where he completed the last year of his bachelor’s degree at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and subsequently worked for five years.

He serves on the State of Illinois’s Behavioral Healthcare Workforce Advisory Committee, the board of the Illinois Children’s Mental Health Partnership, and the City of Chicago’s Council on Mental Health Equity, and the Network for Social Work Management.

A longtime member of Skokie Valley Agudath Jacob Synagogue, Joel lives in Skokie with his wife, Tamara. They have three children and two grandchildren.