Shelly Casto

Fractional Fundraising and Consulting Services

About Me

Shelly Casto is an experienced nonprofit leader and fundraising professional with deep content expertise in ecology, agriculture, food justice, child well-being, and the arts. Through 2019, her career focused on education programming in art museums, including the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. At the Wexner Center, she developed and taught a long-running course on environmentalism and contemporary art, and curated a series of artist projects focused on ecology and food justice. During her work in museums, she was fully embedded in nonprofit best practices and supported robust fundraising efforts.In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Shelly made a career change to focus directly on ecology and food justice, spending the following six years as the first Executive Director of Highland Youth Garden, a small urban farm dedicated to children's health and well-being in a low-income community. During her tenure there, she built an effective fundraising infrastructure, tripled the organization's revenue, substantially expanded its physical facilities, and dramatically grew its programmatic impact.Shelly has completed the Columbus Foundation's Fundraising Leadership Academy. She holds a BA from Oberlin College and an MA from The Ohio State University.

Areas of Service

  • CRM implementation analysis and optimization.

  • Board development training

  • Individual giving strategy design and implementation

  • Small development department strategy design and implementation

  • Small nonprofit leadership

  • Interim nonprofit leadership

  • Grant prospecting and writing (private foundation, corporate, government)

Content Expertise

  • Ecology

  • Agriculture

  • Education

  • Nutrition

  • Child Development

  • Arts

© Shelly Casto Fractional Fundraising LLC