Lottery-fueled Castellano Family Foundation ending operations
Founded with part of a $141 million lottery jackpot, the San Jose foundation worked to amplify the voice of Latino nonprofits in the arts and education.
The Castellano Family Foundation — created out of a record-setting California Lottery jackpot — is ending its operations in June after 22 years of elevating Silicon Valley’s Latino community through millions of dollars in grants.
Carmela Castellano-Garcia, the foundation’s president and daughter of its founders, said the organization has been winding down its work internally for more than a decade since she and her siblings joined the board.
“We looked at the horizon of what we had in the foundation, and we were able to put a plan together of what the next 10 years could look like,” she said Tuesday. “We wanted to see what we could do in that time to influence philanthropy and encourage the Latinx community.”
The San Jose-based foundation’s impact has been significant, starting with more than $7.5 million in grants to a diverse portfolio of organizations large and small that focused on arts and culture, education and leadership, including Somos Mayfair, the Jose Valdés Math Institute, Opera Cultura and San Jose Jazz. Those seeking the foundation’s money were encouraged to diversify their boards and leadership with people of color, especially Latinos. Groups that didn’t show progress had slim chances of a grant renewal.
The Castellano Family Foundation was started by Carmen and Alcario Castellano following their $141 million lottery win in 2001. The couple would often share the story that Carmen Castellano immediately started making a list of the organizations they could help with the surprise windfall, a tale that rings true to those who knew them. Al, a retired Safeway employee, and Carmen, who worked at community colleges for 33 years, were married nearly 60 years and supported numerous causes such as the American G.I. Forum while also putting their three children through college.
Anjee Helstrup-Alvarez, executive director of Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, said the foundation’s support has been “transformational” for the Latino arts venue in downtown San Jose, better known as MACLA. The foundation provided funding for MACLA’s “black box” theater, the Castellano Playhouse in 2004, and continues to be one of its largest donors.
“For us and many of our peers, we don’t have generational wealth or C-suite level board members,” Helstrup-Alvarez said. “They amplified all of our impact.”
Jessica Paz-Cedillos, co-executive director of the School of Arts and Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in San Jose, said having Alcario Castellano make a significant gift to its La Avenida expansion project inspired other philanthropists to make their own pledges to the ambitious vision for San Jose’s Mayfair neighborhood. “That was the power of a Latino-led foundation that unapologetically supported a sector and organizations that are often overlooked,” she said.
In 2021, Castellano Family Foundation joined forces with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to create the LatinXCEL Fund, a $10 million effort to support Latino leaders and groups in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties with long-term funding. That effort grew out of the “Blueprint for Change,” a groundbreaking report the foundation released in 2020 about the equity gap in philanthropy. It was also a call to action to provide more support for traditionally under-represented and under-resourced Latino nonprofits.
“The report really codified what they already knew,” said Tamara Alvarado, program officer for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, who was previously executive director of MACLA and the School of Arts and Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza. “The pandemic shined a bright light on inequities in our community, but they were talking seriously about this long before that. They’ve been a voice for the community since before the foundation.”
An effervescent but sharp-focused businesswoman, Carmen Castellano was the foundation’s president until 2016 when she retired and watched her daughter Carmela, an attorney who also served as president of the California Primary Care Association, take the reins. The couple’s other two children, Armando Castellano and Maria West, sat on the board alongside their father, who eventually transitioned into an emeritus role. Carmen Castellano died in July 2020 at age 81.
The foundation’s trustees began informing its current grantees of their plans last year and made arrangements to ensure grantees with multiyear commitments were funded through 2024, and — in an early sign of the coming change — longtime grantmaker Angie Briones also departed last year. Castellano-Garcia said personally talking to the grantees about their plans was “bittersweet” but also a reminder of how her mother started the foundation by meeting with people to find out what they needed.
“These were people who were organizers in our community. What they demonstrated was that it didn’t matter if you had a foundation because of the lottery or just an extra $10 to give, you could contribute to our community,” Alvarado said. “Philanthropy wasn’t new to the Latino community, but what they were able to do elevated it and raised its visibility.”