Member Spotlight: Dr. Maggie Rivera
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Women’s History Month
This March, we are honoring the women who built community with their own hands and never stopped showing up.
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UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS SPRINGFIELD
Innovate Springfield
Member Spotlight · March 2025
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This Month’s Leader
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Dr. Maggie Rivera
CEO, Illinois Migrant Council
Advocate. Scholar. Mentor.
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Why Dr. Rivera. Why Now.
She Came Up in the Fields. Now She Leads the Organization That Was There for Families Like Hers.
Dr. Maggie Rivera has been CEO of the Illinois Migrant Council for nearly nine years. But her relationship with the organization goes back much further than that. She grew up in a farm worker family in Woodstock, Illinois, bused to school because the farms were far from town, watching migrant families arrive each harvest season and disappear when it ended. She volunteered with the Council as a teenager and spent decades advocating alongside it before the role ever had her name on it. When she describes the job as a full circle moment, she means every word of it.
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Her father came to the United States under the Bracero Program during World War II, a labor agreement that brought Mexican men north to work the fields while American men were overseas. When the program ended in 1964 he was granted permanent residency, brought the family to Chicago, and eventually relocated to a farm in Woodstock when Maggie was 16.
When asked who she looks up to most in her entire life, Dr. Rivera does not hesitate: her mother. It started at home. In 1970s Chicago, her mother stood in rooms full of women and fought for something as basic as a high school in their own neighborhood, because the city had not bothered to build one nearby. Maggie was 13 or 14 years old watching it happen, and the image of those women coming together and pushing for what their children needed never left her. Then the family moved to Woodstock, where she watched farm worker families pour in every harvest season, work from sunup to sundown in the fields, and vanish when the crops were in. She kept noticing the gaps, who had access and who did not, and asking why. By 16 she already knew she was being called toward something. She just did not have a name for it yet. That name, she eventually figured out, was advocate.
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By the numbers
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60+
Years the Illinois Migrant Council has served communities across Illinois
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5
Degrees earned while working full time as a single mother
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9
Years as CEO of IMC, calling it the greatest honor of her life
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“Once you have an education, it’s yours forever. Nobody can take that away from you.”
Dr. Maggie Rivera
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She Became a Student for Life
At 24, Maggie was a single mother living back in Woodstock, working a part-time seasonal job with a government energy program. A colleague there became her first real mentor. She told her something that cracked everything open: you are bilingual, your community needs people like you, and you can help shape it. Maggie’s response, by her own admission, was something like, help who? With what?
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“She told me I could help shape my community. And I thought, oh, you mean we can vote? We can run for office? And she said, you can do anything you want.”
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That conversation sent her back to school. She enrolled as an adult student, balancing a full-time job, a daughter she was raising alone, and coursework, all supported by four sisters and a mother who never let her quit. She eventually earned an associate degree in criminology, a bachelor’s in behavioral science, a master’s in clinical psychology, an MBA, and a doctorate in education, taking classes in both Mexico and the United States. She briefly tried law school and decided it was not for her, not because she could not do it, but because she realized a law degree would tie her hands in ways that advocacy never would. She is currently three classes away from a third master’s in public administration and shows no signs of slowing down.
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Decades of Showing Up
Dr. Rivera understood early that being counted is not symbolic. It is how funding gets allocated, programs get created, and communities get what they need. During the 1980 census she went door to door because she knew Latinos in her community were not registering, and she knew exactly what that cost them: fewer resources, less representation, and another cycle of being left out of the decisions that shaped their lives. So she knocked on doors until people understood that filling out a form was an act of power.
Today the Illinois Migrant Council operates three permanent offices in Crystal Lake, Springfield, and Cobden, with seasonal pop-up locations that open wherever farm workers arrive in large numbers, including Freeport, Peoria, and Rantoul. The organization follows the people, not the other way around, and provides services in Spanish, French, Tagalog, and whatever language the community in front of them speaks.
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“If my father was alive, he would probably be very proud of what I got.”
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On Mentorship
“We cannot ask our youth to do something we have not set an example for.”
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On Purpose
“Find your passion. What is it that, at the end of the day, is going to make you feel good about yourself?”
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On Self-Worth
“You have to love yourself first. You have to think of yourself as the best thing next to bread and butter.”
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Women’s History Month Spotlight
The Human Part Is the Best Part
At the Illinois Migrant Council, women make up the majority of the workforce. Dr. Rivera does not think this is a coincidence. She thinks it is because the work demands exactly what women have always been asked to give, compassion, persistence, and the ability to hold a community together, and it finally gives them a platform to do it on their own terms.
She runs women’s reading groups where the whole point is to create a space, a room where people who understand each other can speak freely. She pushes the women around her to take care of themselves first, not as a luxury but as the foundation of everything else. Her mother’s rule was simple: you go first, then the others. Dr. Rivera has lived by it her whole career.
This Women’s History Month, we are not just celebrating what Dr. Rivera has built. We are celebrating what she keeps reminding us: the human part of you, the part that listens, connects, and refuses to give up, is the best version of what any of us can give this world.
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What She Pushes People Toward
She describes herself, without any embarrassment, as a pusher. Anybody who ends up in her orbit gets encouraged, nudged, and followed up with until they move. Kids she mentored as children have grown into doctors, attorneys, accountants, and entrepreneurs, including one young man she knew since he was eight years old who now owns a chain of grocery stores. One of the attorneys she mentored sits on her board of directors today. She was at one of their bridal showers last Saturday. She has watched the people she helped grow up into people who help others, and she considers that the most rewarding thing she has ever done. Four guiding principles drive how she does it:
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01 Show the Path
You cannot show someone a road you have never walked. She has walked every road she asks others to take.
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02 Every Door Counts
College is not the only path. Apprenticeships count. Trades count. The goal is a life that fits, not a credential for its own sake.
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03 Hold, Then Launch
Walk with people when they need it. Hold their hand. Then be ready to let go and watch them take off.
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04 Find Your Happiness
Stop chasing someone else’s definition of success. Find what makes you feel like yourself, and build from there.
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“It’s a lifeline for families. It provides access to education, health, immigration, crisis support, and anything else a person may need to advance in their own life.”
Dr. Rivera, on the Illinois Migrant Council’s 60th anniversary
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Looking Ahead
When UIS Innovate Springfield was recommended to Dr. Rivera as a potential home for the Council’s Springfield office, she walked in and felt something she was not expecting: warmth. Other organizations were already there, opening their doors, making introductions, showing her around. She describes it simply as very good vibes, the feeling of landing in exactly the community where she needed to be.
She believes Springfield represents something larger than its geography. The laws are made there, the debates happen there, and the people willing to listen are there if you are persistent enough to bring your voice. But there is also a community that gets overlooked while the legislators come and go, and closing that gap is exactly what she came to do.
At UIS Innovate Springfield, we are proud to call Dr. Rivera a member of this community. She is exactly the kind of leader this space was built to support: someone who shows up, does the work, lifts others as she goes, and never, ever stops learning.
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