Robin Toma Announced as Keynote Speaker for Third Annual Pepperdine Caruso Law Belonging Awards
The Pepperdine Caruso Law Office of Diversity and Belonging is pleased to announce Robin S. Toma as the keynote speaker for the third annual Belonging Awards. Toma is the executive director of the Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations Commission.
The Belonging Awards celebrate the diversity of the students, faculty, staff, and alumni at Caruso Law. The event will honor student organizations that thoughtfully promote diversity, belonging, and important views at the school; alumni who promote diversity and belonging in their profession; and faculty, staff, and the individual students who exemplify diversity, inclusion, and belonging at the school of law. To register, please visit Belonging Awards.
More on Robin S. Toma:
Robin S. Toma is Executive Director of the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations Commission. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the International Association of Official Human Rights Agencies and the California Association of Human Relations Organizations, having served as president of both. He’s also a Senior Fellow of UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, and previously served on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s California Advisory Committee. A proud alumnus of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government’s ExecutiveSession on Human Rights Commissions and Criminal Justice, as well as the Kellogg National Fellowship/Leadership Program, Robin was also honored to serve as an adviser/member of the 2010 Obama Administration’s delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, and was invited to serve on the official U.S. government’s Delegation to the U.N. World Conference Against Racism held in South Africa in 2001.
A native Angeleno and ‘Sansei’ of Japanese and Okinawan ancestry, Robin grew up in the Echo Park/Silver Lake neighborhoods, attending public schools. He holds a B.A. with highest honors in Sociology and honors in Economics from UC Santa Cruz, and earned at UCLA a Juris Doctor degree from its law school and a M.A. in Urban Planning. Robin has traveled extensively, is fluent in Spanish, lived in Barcelona for 2 years, and later taught in Los Angeles public schools. Prior to working in LA County government, Robin was an ACLU staff attorney in L.A. for almost 7 years, and litigated a wide range of human rights and civil liberties cases, including international abductions, free speech, voting rights, language rights, unlawful discrimination in public transportation and education, and policing issues.