Young people have told us what they need to remain stably housed and keep them from falling into homelessness. It’s small grants of cash: help with a security deposit, a car repair so they can get to work, or a few months of help with utilities at Grandma’s house.
Thanks to the advocacy of Councilmember Dionne Foster, youth in the City of Seattle can now access the Homelessness Prevention and Diversion Fund (HPDF) which provides fast and flexible funding to that enable young people in crisis to stay housed or quickly be re-housed.
This expansion is possible through a public private partnership between the City and the Washington Acceleration Fund, a new philanthropic pooled fund working to accelerate Washington’s work to prevent and end youth homelessness. Campion is a proud partner of the Acceleration Fund. This inaugural grant is an exciting example of the data-driven and youth informed investments that the Fund will make.
Seattle joins 10 other communities across Washington state where the HPDF has already proven it can change the trajectory of a young person’s life.
Why This Matters
Washington has done something no other state has done: reduced youth homelessness by 40% over six years. That progress didn’t come from one institution or one program. It came from a system — one built on public-private partnership, on data, and on trusting young people to tell us what they need.
The HPDF is a clear expression of that trust. Seventy-two percent of the young people who access it are couch surfing or on the edge of losing housing altogether. With an average disbursement of under $2,000, the fund meets them exactly where they are, before a temporary crisis hardens into a much longer one.
The stakes could not be higher. We know that 48% of adults experiencing chronic homelessness first lost their housing before the age of 25. Stopping that first housing crisis isn’t just about helping a young person today — it’s about preventing a lifetime of instability. And we know it works: over the past year, 87% of the young people who received an HPDF grant remained stably housed a year later.
A Public-Private Partnership, Proven Since 2020
The HPDF was first launched in 2020 as a partnership between the Schultz Family Foundation, A Way Home Washington, the Washington State Department of Commerce’s Office of Homeless Youth, and regional partners across the state. Since then, it’s become one of the clearest examples of what happens when philanthropy, government, and community organizations row in the same direction: real, measurable results for young people.
The Washington Acceleration Fund, a new partnership including initial funders the Campion Foundation, the Raikes Foundation, and The Schultz Family Foundation, was recently launched to build on what’s already working—and accelerate it into transformative impact, so every young person has a place to call home. We believe Washington can be the first state to end youth homelessness—and that the HPDF is the tool that can bring us to this new reality.
“The Washington Acceleration Fund thanks Councilmember Foster and applauds the City of Seattle for applying the innovation our region is known for to the challenge of solving youth homelessness,” said Sonya Campion, President and Trustee of the Campion Foundation. “This is an example of an effective public private partnership with community partners reaching out directly to youth, philanthropy supporting research and evaluation and now public partners helping to scale what works.”
The Work Ahead
Washington is home to an estimated 13,000 young people under 25 who are on their own and unstably housed. We know approximately 1,000 of those youth are in Seattle, Bringing the HPDF to Seattle is a major step forward to ending youth homelessness. We must continue to accelerate this effort.
With the City of Seattle now part of this effort, we’re one step closer to a region and state where youth homelessness is rare, brief, and resolved quickly.