The Castellano Family Foundation in San Jose, California, is planning to sunset its operations after 22 years, the Mercury News reports.

In 2001, Carmen and Alcario Castellano used a then-record $141 million California Lottery jackpot to create the foundation and put their three children through college. The foundation focuses on Silicon Valley’s Latinx community and funds Latinx arts, education, and leadership development. For example, in 2021, the foundation joined forces with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to create the LatinXCEL Fund, a $10 million effort to support Latinx leaders and groups in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties with long-term funding.

Carmen Castellano died in July 2020 at age 81. The foundation’s trustees began informing its current grantees of their plans last year and arranging to ensure grantees with multiyear commitments were funded through 2024. 

“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,” Carmela Castellano-Garcia, the foundation’s president and daughter of its founders, told the Mercury News. “We wanted to see what we could do in that time to influence philanthropy and encourage the Latinx community.” 

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