Sophie Allen-Etchart
Sophie Allen-Etchart was born in Connecticut but raised and educated in England, receiving her B.A. in Modern Languages from the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Upon graduation, Sophie joined a financial services agency specializing in board-level strategic HR consulting. Soon after, Sophie moved to Peru and began managing SKIP, an international development organization.
Sophie met her husband, an Arizona native, in Peru and moved to Phoenix in 2012. Once in Phoenix, she spent 2 years managing the JA BizTown® team at Junior Achievement. There, Sophie identified the need for basic reading comprehension support. The JA BizTown® program serves over 20,000 students per year, an alarming number of whom had neither the focus nor the foundational reading skills to obtain the most value from the experience. In 2010, when Arizona’s “Move On When Reading” law was announced, Sophie decided that the timing was critical to support those 3rd graders at risk of not being promoted to 4th grade because of a lack of reading proficiency.
In 2017, Sophie was recognized as one of Phoenix Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 and was nominated for the Greater Phoenix Chamber’s ATHENA Award in both 2019 and 2020. Sophie currently lives in Downtown Phoenix with her husband, her son Cody, and daughter Joey. In her free time, Sophie is driven to continue to advocate for those causes about which she is passionate – either by canvassing locally or participating in lively discussions with friends and neighbors.
