Julie Sponsler
Director of Finance and Operations
Julie provides strategic financial leadership and ensures that fiscal and operating systems are well designed and implemented to best support the Foundation’s mission.
She has worked as a grantmaker or in service of grantmakers for nearly 15 years. At Seattle’s ArtsFund she served as Finance Director and managed the annual grant allocations process. At Grantmakers in the Arts she coordinated national conferences for arts and arts education grantmakers. Most recently, she served as Finance Director for Giddens School, an elementary school whose mission is rooted in social justice and equity. In addition to keeping the school on sound financial footing, she helped secure ownership and financing to develop the school’s new campus.
Julie holds a Master of Arts in Arts Management from Columbia College Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Communication from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. She also served as a Fellow with the Illinois Governor’s Office. Julie is from Ashland, Illinois and came to Seattle by way of Chicago. In the past, she has studied French, Russian, Japanese and Italian languages and looks forward to now studying Spanish.
In light of the increasingly complex circumstances for Central Americans, I am grateful to be supporting SIF’s mission and to work with such a devoted team in carrying out SIF’s programs. Our founders' recognition of global inequity, and their actions to address this issue, have been an inspiration.
