Gloria Castillo

Gloria Castillo is a business and civic leader and an advocate for social and economic justice. She is the former director of We Rise Together: For an Equitable and Just Recovery, a multi-faceted, five-year initiative of The Chicago Community Trust. The coalition of public and private funders raised and granted $50m to accelerate equity in the Chicago region’s Covid-19 economic recovery. The initiative focused on investment in the built environment for long disinvested communities and supporting entrepreneurship and skills development.

Until the spring of 2020, Castillo served for 16 years as president and CEO of Chicago United, a corporate membership organization dedicated to advancing multiracial leadership in business to achieve parity of economic opportunity for people of color and minority business enterprises. She collaborated with business, philanthropic, and local community leaders and organizations across the Chicago region to develop and execute initiatives to advance business excellence in corporate governance, executive-level management, and B2B partnerships.

Among Castillo’s entrepreneurial ventures, she founded CMC Enterprises, LLC an airport concessions firm. CMC specializes in retail operations and is a partner with Hudson Group at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

Numerous organizations have recognized Castillo’s work in advocacy and in business, most notably in 2017, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Social Justice from Roosevelt University. In 2023 Seramount honored Castillo with the Multicultural Women Legacy Award. The Rainbow PUSH Coalition presented her with the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Social Justice Award. She has been honored as Entrepreneurial Woman of the Year by The Women’s Business Development Center and Minority Entrepreneur of the Year by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Castillo has served on a number of civic and nonprofit boards with oversight of assets ranging from $60 million to $3 billion. She currently serves as vice chair of the Field Foundation Board of Directors and as a director of the Mather Foundation.