“I love lists,” says Ann Castle, who got into the listmaking business last year when the online magazine Slate asked her for a roundup of the nation’s biggest givers. “Because of the Slate list, lots of people have contacted me about doing this in their state,” she says, though she hadn’t done another list until she produced the massive compendium of Texas philanthropy for this month’s Texas Monthly (see “Thanks a Million,”). Castle, who is a development officer at tiny Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and formerly worked in fundraising at Harvard University, has long been interested in giving and volunteerism and is particularly taken with women in philanthropy; she even maintains a Web site on the subject (www.hamilton.edu/personal/acastle *). “What has been fun is recognizing people for their philanthropy,” she says, noting that because “Texans are very generous,” she had no problem finding enough givers to round out Texas Monthly ’s list. And unlike a certain other listmaker this time of year, Castle didn’t have to worry about separating the naughty from the nice, only the nicest from the nice.
* web address is no longer active.
