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 efficient and 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 and now serves as a fractional fundraising consultant focused on small nonprofits. She holds a BA from Oberlin College and an MA from The Ohio State University.