Resilience in Action

While 2025 isn’t even halfway through, it’s clear that one of the major stories of the year will be the devastating fires that burned more than 40,000 acres in Los Angeles this January. The dimensions of that tragedy aren’t yet calculated, but we already know that for tens of thousands of Angelenos life will never be the same.

It’s a cliché, but when others have to run away from danger, we go towards it.

Brittany Perkins Castillo ’13

The harsh reality of natural disasters — there were 27 events last year with damages of at least $1B each — is incomprehensible to most but is very well understood by Brittany Perkins Castillo ’13.

“It’s a cliché, but when others have to run away from danger, we go towards it,” says Castillo. “There is no challenge so great that the experience and wisdom of the brave people I work with cannot overcome, if we can give them the right tools and support.”

This hard-won wisdom comes to Castillo through her work as the CEO of AshBritt, a national leader in emergency management and disaster response services and a key organization that governments turn to when disasters hit their communities.

Humble Beginnings

The story of AshBritt’s rise is a remarkable and quintessentially American one.

The company was started in Florida in 1992 by Randall and Saily Perkins on the infrastructure of their previous venture, Grasshopper Landscaping, a small family-run business. Saily, the daughter of Cuban immigrants, and Randall, a self-made entrepreneur, named it after the couple’s two young daughters,
Ashley and Brittany. (Two more daughters, Sara and Sam, soon followed.)

The company in 1992 was doing then what it still does today: helping people in times of great need, namely responding to the devastation of Hurricane Andrew. Just last year, AshBritt, now under Castillo’s leadership, was tasked by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to tackle major parts of the recovery effort after Hurricane Helene destroyed parts of Georgia and Florida, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and more. And they are in conversations to take over parts of the recovery in Los Angeles.

The company’s website lists more than 50 projects the company has taken on since its founding, a mere sampling of the hundreds of projects AshBritt has overseen in that time. Annual revenue, which has more than doubled under Castillo’s time as the chief executive, has in recent years exceeded $2B.

‘We’re in the logistics business.’

Castillo started working officially for the family business in 2009, when she joined the Board of Directors.

“A lot of my classmates will tell you I was never here,” jokes Castillo about her constant commuting between Austin and the AshBritt headquarters north of Miami during law school. “But I was just giving my all to both endeavors.”

In fact, Castillo participated in many activities, especially throwing herself into the Immigration Clinic, where she stood out as someone who took on big challenges.

“Brittany was a superstar from the start, no doubt about it,” says Denise Gilman, the co-director of the Immigration Clinic. “It was very clear that she was going to make a mark.”

Going above and beyond representing individual clients — the typical model of clinical education — Castillo developed a model for group clinics in which hundreds of people who might be eligible for protection under the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, could be seen in a single day or weekend by an army of fellow law students (trained often by Castillo herself).

That formative experience showed Castillo’s gift for managing complex projects to meet exigent human needs on an enterprise level.

“I do ‘logistics mode,’ first and foremost,” Castillo says of her approach to crisis response. “Sometimes it’s a disaster you can anticipate, such as a hurricane, sometimes it’s a wildfire or flash flooding, that you can’t. Or a man-made accident, such as an oil spill. We can respond to anything.”

It’s all practical and purpose-driven.”

For AshBritt, that can mean evacuating team members who might live in the area of the disaster, or staging equipment and personnel to respond immediately. (They currently have 1700 people, some employees and some private contractors, working in North Carolina alone, all tasked to the Helene recovery.) It also means working rapidly in advance of or immediately alongside a disaster event, establishing leadership and emergency operation centers with the local or state government, and supporting the response in real time with logistics: food, water and fuel; clearing access to hospitals, nursing homes, and critical infrastructure facilities; and reestablishing power.

“We work to restore order in a time of chaos and then hammer away at recovery, with an eye towards resilience,” Castillo says. “It’s all practical and purpose-driven.”

People First

Castillo’s emphasis on the mechanics of disaster response belies the heart behind her work.

Disaster cleanup is more than debris removal. It’s about restoring a community and setting it on a path to recovery.

Megan Sheffield ’13,
Castillo’s classmate and close friend

“Disaster cleanup is more than debris removal,” says Megan Sheffield ’13, an Austin immigration lawyer who is one of Castillo’s closest law school friends. “It’s about restoring a community and setting it on a path to recovery.” Sheffield says she and their other friends are quick to brag about Castillo (“I love it when I turn on the news and Brittany is on my television!”), but she says Castillo is more focused on the humanitarian achievements than the billion-dollar contracts or her high-profile role as CEO.

Castillo is particularly concerned about the impact of disasters on children. Having seen for herself the emotional challenges experienced by the youngest victims of disasters, Castillo started Stronger Than the Storm, a nonprofit cultivating resilience and bringing awareness to the specific needs of children in disaster recovery work, including psychological first-aid training for professionals who work with children post-disaster.

Another project of Stronger Than the Storm is a book series for children, lightheartedly named Good Fun for
Bad Days. Castillo wrote the second title in the series, Henry and the Hurricane, and she has two more
books coming, Rocky’s Road to Recovery and Professor Preparopotamus.

The Future

Just as AshBritt helps ravaged communities see a better future, Castillo thinks constantly about the future of her company.

To the core original business of debris cleanup and removal, Castillo has added two new divisions in the last five years. In 2020, AshBritt launched a dedicated logistics and management group that trains states and municipalities (and can be activated in disaster zones when needed). And, in 2022, she galvanized the company’s expertise in utilities and transportation challenges under a division called AshBritt Infrastructure.

But what of Castillo’s future? While she has no plans to lighten her load as a CEO, she hungers for additional outlets for her physical and creative energy — beyond the Ironman competitions, the nonprofit boards, and her busy schedule as a parent to the two young children she shares with husband, Gerardo Castillo BA ’02, MPA ’17.

One possibility could bring her back to The Forty Acres. “I’ve been talking about teaching,” Castillo laughs, though it’s clear she takes the prospect seriously. “We have to find the right schedule, but I hope to be back in Austin soon teaching a course with the McCombs School.”

Could a law course also be in the offing? “For sure!” she says. “I can’t overstate how important the law school is to me. I owe so much to the people there, what I learned, and how it challenged and shaped me. I love Texas Law.”