If Marvin and Mae Acosta follow through on their promise to give some of their $529 million in Powerball winnings to charity, they may want to give Alcario and Carmen Castellano a call, because they know the ropes.
Like the Castellanos, the Acostas said they would make philanthropy a priority shortly after their newfound wealth as lottery winners was disclosed earlier this week.
“While many decisions are still to be made, we have committed nearly all of this new resource to a trust and to charities that are important to us,” the Acostas said in a statement.
Other lottery winners also have donated generously to charity.
The Acostas have given no specifics yet about their plans for the money. However, the Castellanos recently spoke at length with The Chronicle about their journey from working-class family to millionaire philanthropists.
The Castellanos did more than shower money on a few favored causes; they did their homework on the nonprofit world, vetting charities carefully from top to bottom. In particular, they took a hard look at the boardrooms of their local charities, and sometimes they didn’t like what they saw.
From Disbelief to Action
Mr. Castellano thought his eyes were playing tricks on him one summer morning 15 years ago when the numbers listed in the newspaper indicated he and his wife had won a $141 million lottery jackpot. Maybe it was a dream. He decided to take a walk around the block, and if the numbers were still there when he returned, he would wake his wife, Carmen.
“This is kind of insane that I did this, but I just had to be sure, so when I came back I looked at the tickets and the newspaper again,” said Mr. Castellano. “The numbers were still there.”
He woke his wife and asked her to double check the numbers. She confirmed them. The Castellanos were instant multimillionaires.
All of those zeros were hard to fathom for the couple, who had never known great wealth. He retired as a grocery-store clerk 12 years earlier, and she was working as a college secretary when they won.
But within minutes Ms. Castellano sprang into action. She sat down and wrote a long list of local San Jose-area nonprofits.
“We had been longtime community activists and volunteers and giving at a dollar level we could,” said Ms. Castellano. “So we knew right off we were going to share it with these groups we had already been involved with.”
The couple took their winnings in a lump sum of $70.5 million, ending up with a $41.5 million windfall after taxes. They promptly paid off the college loans of their three grown children and helped extended family. They also started the Castellano Family Foundation to support Latinos: specifically, educating youths, supporting arts and culture, and promoting leadership and diversity.
They have put $5.5 million into the foundation and have so far given away more than $4.6 million to about 170 nonprofits. They support at least 50 organizations annually.
Board Diversity
The Castellanos said the early years they spent working with local Latino-focused charities made them realize how few Latinos served on nonprofit boards. When they started the foundation, they set out to change that and made sure board diversity informed their grant-making choices.
Today they will not support a charity that does not have a racially diverse board, and they push for more Latino representation on the boards of nonprofits that seek to help that population.
“If 99 percent of the community they’re serving is Latino, we expect a majority of Latino representation on the board,” said Ms. Castellano. “The rationale is because of the cultural competency that comes with having someone from the community able to voice, with a basis of knowledge, what the needs are in that particular community.”
The couple see themselves as catalysts for such change, and they speak publicly on the topic when attending philanthropy conferences and in one-on-one conversations with nonprofit leaders.
“Some of the organizations that we’ve pointed this out to, guess what?” said Mr. Castellano. “They would come back and say, ‘Oh, we have diversity on our boards now.’ "
This pleases the couple, and they will sometimes consider awarding a grant to a charity they had previously turned down.
The Castellanos also spend a lot of time researching a charity and attending events before they award a grant. They visit a nonprofit’s offices and the places where it carries out its services so they can hear from the beneficiaries.
“Being at the site where they do the work and talking to parents or students really gives you a tremendous sense of whether that’s something we want to support or not,” said Ms. Castellano.
They also make an effort to get to know a nonprofit’s staff and say it is those personal conversations — hearing personal anecdotes and success stories — that over time help them gain confidence in a nonprofit’s work.
Charitable Roots
The couple’s emphasis on helping Latinos is a natural outgrowth of their own heritage (each has a parent born in Mexico) and early charitable experiences.
Both grew up in the central coast region of California but in different financial circumstances.
Mr. Castellano said his family was poor, and their financial troubles grew worse when his parents divorced in 1948 when he was 13. While his mother took in needy family members, he worked throughout high school and after to help his mother raise the family.
Ms. Castellano’s father owned a trucking business and would sometimes bring home families that hadn’t eaten in a few days or were struggling to find shelter. Her mother would cook for them, and her father would try to find a place for them to live.
“They had really generous hearts for the downtrodden,” said Ms. Castellano. “We didn’t talk about it, but I learned by example.”
She got hooked on volunteering with charities in early adulthood and worked as a secretary at San Jose City College for 37 years before retiring in 2001 to run the foundation.
Mr. Castellano’s path included joining the Army after high school and working as a pyrotechnics technician in the aerospace industry in the 1960s before taking a job at Safeway, from which he retired in 1989.
Next Generation
Even in the early days of their marriage, the Castellanos took the charitable lessons they learned as children to a different level. They served on local nonprofit boards, got involved in advocacy work, and volunteered in other ways to help their local Latino population.
Like their parents, the Castellanos taught their children by example. Carmen, Armando, and Maria Castellano attended predominantly white schools with mostly white teachers:
“The diversity of teachers was not there, and Carmen and I played a role in trying to get diversified teachers in the district,” said Mr. Castellano. “So the children were aware of that. We didn’t talk too much about it, but they knew what was going on.”
The children learned about advocacy and charity and today play their own roles in both. They all serve on local nonprofit boards and advocate for Latino arts and culture. They have also taken a more direct role in the foundation recently.
At ages 82 and 77, Mr. and Ms. Castellano are stepping away from the day-to-day running of the foundation.
Carmela Castellano-Garcia, a Yale law graduate who leads a nonprofit health-care organization, has become president of the foundation. The other two serve on its board, and all three have taken over conducting most of the charity site visits.
Mr. and Ms. Castellano said they plan to spend down the foundation’s assets by 2026 unless their children want to contribute to keep it running. And the parents are not out of the picture completely. They continue their direct involvement with many of the nonprofits they have known for so many decades, and Ms. Castellano serves as the foundation’s vice president.
Mr. Castellano helps a number of charities raise money from other donors.
“I’m kind of the ambassador of the foundation in the community,” he said, joking that everywhere he goes people are still happy to see him even though he doesn’t say much in meetings. “Some people still want to touch me to see if some luck will rub off after all these years.”
The Castellanos say winning the lottery didn’t change them. They already owned their own home, their kids all had master’s degrees, and the couple had saved enough to live modestly but comfortably in retirement. They felt they had achieved the American Dream.
“The most important thing Carmen and I did was we worked hard together to accomplish what we have, even before we won,” said Mr. Castellano. “And, hey, I’m very proud of that.”
But they admit winning the money gave them a chance to help their families and Latinos in ways they never imagined.
When they look back at their nonprofit work over the years, their hope is that their charitable and advocacy efforts will influence other wealthy Latinos.
“Latinos are very generous. They give to their churches, their friends, their families, and neighbors, but in terms of giving through a formal foundation, it’s new to them,” said Ms. Castellano. “We want Latinos who can afford to give to consider doing it in a formal way and being very present.”
Note: This article has been updated to correct Carmela Castellano-Garcia’s name.
