Gloria Duffy

Gloria Charmian Duffy (born September 4, 1953) is a former U.S. Department of Defense official, businesswoman, social entrepreneur and nonprofit executive. Since 1996, she has been the president, CEO and a member of the Board of Governors of the Commonwealth Club of California, America's largest and oldest public forum, founded in 1903. From 2010 to 2017 she led the fundraising, acquisition, financing, design, entitlements and construction of the club's first headquarters building, at 110 The Embarcadero in San Francisco. The grand opening for the club's new building took place on September 12, 2017. The building received a 2016 California Heritage Council award for historic preservation. She is the "voice" of the Commonwealth Club radio broadcast, heard weekly on 230 stations throughout the US, which has been on the air continuously for 100 years, since 1924.

In February, 2022 Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi appointed Duffy to be a member of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States. The Strategic Posture Commission submitted its report to the Congress and the Executive Branch in October, 2023.

Duffy's mother was Gloria S Duffy, a pioneering radio broadcaster in Missouri, Denver and San Francisco, as well Fashion Director of San Francisco's City of Paris department store and a philanthropist. Beloved in her community, Gloria Senior was a board member of United Way of the Bay Area and the American Red Cross Northern California Coastal Region, and a recipient of the Red Cross's Clara Barton Award for outstanding humanitarian service and volunteer leadership. She died in 2022. Gloria Jr. attended public schools in Lafayette, California, and began working in her family's real estate and land development office while a student at M. H. Stanley Middle School in 1965. She also taught sports to developmentally and intellectually challenged kids at Las Trampas School, through Futures Explored in Lafayette. She graduated from Acalanes High School in 1971, completing a full curriculum of life science courses. She excelled in Spanish, receiving a medal for her proficiency from the National Society of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She was the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, The Blueprint. While a student, she served on the Lafayette School District's Drug Education Committee. She also co-founded, with her classmate Dr. Donald Goff, the Lafayette Youth Services Commission, which marked its 50th anniversary in 2021.

Duffy holds a 1975 A.B. degree magna cum laude from Occidental College in Los Angeles, where her general studies track was science and human values, her major was interdisciplinary studies, she was a College Scholar and she was co-editor-in-chief of The Occidental Weekly, the campus newspaper. She was on the college's Educational Policy and Curriculum Committee.

Duffy holds a doctorate, an M.Phil. and an M.A. in political science, from Columbia University in New York, where she was a Presidents' Fellow, studied with the late Marshall D. Shulman, and was a research assistant to Zbigniew Brzezinski prior to his appointment as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. She was also research assistant to Dr. Gordon Adams. Her master's thesis was on the impact of US and Soviet policies in Iran and Iraq in the early 1970s on the two countries' Kurdish populations, completed with support from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., where she was a Humanitarian Policy Studies Fellow in the summer of 1976.

After completing her coursework at Columbia at the end of 1976, Duffy worked as a resident consultant at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California and then as Communications Director at the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C., before returning to academia to complete her Ph.D.

In 1980, Dr. Coit Blacker invited Duffy to become an Arms Control Fellow at Stanford University's Arms Control Program. Duffy held a Hubert H. Humphrey Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, from the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which supported the preparation of her Columbia University doctoral thesis while at CISAC, on the impact of US domestic politics on the non-ratification of the SALT II Treaty. She was one of four female fellows Blacker recruited, notable in the largely male international security and arms control field, including Condoleezza Rice, who later became National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush and Secretary of State; the late Janne Nolan, and Cynthia Roberts. Duffy and Rice lived together in a rented house in Palo Alto. Nolan began calling the group "the Fellowettes," a name that stuck and the group became life-long friends and colleagues.

Duffy has had a varied career, including research, journalism, education, business, management, scientific collaboration and research funding, philanthropy, public service at the local and national levels, defense and arms control policy, international arms negotiations, conflict resolution and real estate management and development. She has founded, been President/CEO and chaired the board of a number of projects and organizations, including serving as the CEO of three organizations for a total of 46 years. Organizations she has founded, co-founded, of which she has chaired the board or was President and CEO include the Lafayette Youth Services Commission, Global Outlook, Ploughshares Fund, the World Forum of Silicon Valley, CRDF Global, the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy and the Commonwealth Club of California.