Ellie Dehghan is passionate about utilizing her legal background to help nonprofits maximize impact. Most recently, Ellie served as Head of Legal and Director of People for Callisto – a nonprofit tech startup working to combat sexual assault and advance justice.
Ellie began her career as a litigation associate at Bryan Cave LLP. She then spent six years designing and delivering legal services to meet the needs of vulnerable populations throughout California. This included working with youth experiencing homelessness in Silicon Valley through Bay Area Legal Aid’s Youth Justice Project, assisting patients of St. John’s medical clinic in South Los Angeles through the Medical Legal Community Partnership at Neighborhood Legal Services, leading the delivery of legal services to rural and isolated communities, throughout Northern California at OneJustice, with a focus on immigrant communities, and creating Callisto’s legal advice and counseling program for victims of repeat offenders of sexual assault.
Ellie’s commitment to her work is influenced by her own family’s story. The daughter of Mexican and Iranian immigrants, she has called the San Francisco Bay Area her home since her family fled the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Ellie is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Stanford Law School. She enjoys hiking, writing, cooking, and spending time with her husband and their mischievous and smiley five-month-old son.