Sonya Campion is president of the Campion Advocacy Fund, a 501(c)(4) partner to the Campion Foundation, which she co-founded with her husband, Tom Campion. The focus of both organizations and their founders is to leverage every tool — their voices, partners in philanthropy, staff, communications, and strategic advocacy — to end youth homelessness, increase access to safe housing, and conserve public lands as a solution to the climate crisis.
Sonya’s work to leverage change is based on the belief that no one can go it alone and together the sector has immense power. She also founded Funders Together to End Homelessness, a national network of foundations supporting strategic grantmaking and advocacy to end homelessness; launched the national Stand for Your Mission campaign with BoardSource to mobilize the sector’s 20 million board members for effective social change advocacy and to strengthen the nonprofit voice in public policy; and, in Washington state, worked with Governor Inslee’s administration to set up the first Office of Homeless Youth to streamline public policy, resulting in a 40% decrease in youth homelessness. She serves on the Whitman College President’s Advisory Board and the Independent Sector Board of Directors, and recently chaired a statewide COVID-19 response task force that established A Mindful State to address the growing mental health crisis as a result of the pandemic. She is a founder and policy member of the national Generosity Commission, focused on turning around the alarming decline in philanthropic giving.
Additionally, Sonya has worked as a professional fundraiser, serving for 20 years as vice president of The Collins Group (now Campbell and Company), a regional fundraising consulting firm, where she worked with over 100 organizations raising over $600 million in capital and major gifts campaigns. She is among the rare philanthropic professionals to be honored with the AFP Professional Achievement Award for both raising money and giving it away with her lifetime professional leadership in fundraising, and honored again a few years later with her husband Tom as AFP’s Philanthropists of the Year in recognition of their catalytic philanthropy. She was named a “Woman of Influence” and a “Board Director of the Year” by the Puget Sound Business Journal, as well as one of the national NonProfit Times Power & Influence Top 50 leaders in the country.
For balance and sanity, she often disappears into wild, natural settings, from the Methow Valley to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
