Strategic Treasurer for Sustainable Climate Charity

Join our friendly board at Sustainable Chipping Norton! Help shape local climate resilience and environmental projects. You'll bring vital financial skills to a growing community charity, helping us transition to paid staff while ensuring robust financial governance for long-term impact.

What difference will you make? By taking on this role, you will directly de-risk our charity’s governance, stabilise our leadership capacity, and allow us to focus entirely on expanding our environmental initiatives. Your appointment solves a critical governance vulnerability by cleanly separating the roles of Chair and Treasurer, restoring necessary checks and balances to our board, aligning with standard Charity Commission best practice and giving external funders confidence in our independent oversight.

Your financial leadership removes an immense practical burden from our Chair, allowing them to focus strictly on strategic development. Your assumption of these responsibilities also protects the capacity of our Chief Executive Officer, ensuring she can focus entirely on front-line project delivery and securing high-level strategic funding without being isolated in complex financial reporting. Your work will ensure the Trustees have the financial clarity needed to make confident, data-driven decisions about project spending and reserve allocations.

The robust financial frameworks and strategic oversight workflows you establish now will form the operational blueprint our paid staff will inherit once our core funding is secured. Your involvement directly drives our commitment to youth empowerment. By mentoring our incoming 16-18 year old shadow trustee, you will be providing a young person with invaluable professional skills and confidence, ensuring our board reflects the community we serve.

Ultimately, your expertise changes our trajectory from a short-term, reactive grassroots group into a resilient, legally robust, and long-term community institution.

What are we looking for? We are looking for a structured, analytical, and community-minded individual with at least three years of experience in finance, accountancy, or business management to lead our financial governance. The most important requirement is the capability to translate numbers into strategic insights for the board, combined with a genuine interest in local environmental sustainability and climate resilience.

• Essential Experience And Skills
• Financial Literacy and Oversight: You must have a minimum of three years of proven experience in financial management, budgeting, or accountancy. While professional qualifications (such as ACA, ACCA, CIMA, or CIPFA) are highly desirable, we equally welcome individuals with strong, equivalent practical experience running business or organisational finances over this period.
• Strategic Reporting: Experience in preparing and presenting clear financial reports—specifically management accounts and cash flow forecasts—is essential. You must be comfortable explaining financial data to non-finance trustees to enable confident, collective decision-making.
• Systems and Controls: An understanding of internal financial controls, risk management, and the ability to review and design secure banking and accounting workflows as the charity prepares to scale.

• Desirable Experience
• Charity Finance: Knowledge of charity accounting standards (SORP), standard HMRC Gift Aid claim processes, and the structural management of restricted versus unrestricted funding is an advantage, though guidance and orientation can be provided.
• Mentorship or Leadership: Experience or an interest in mentoring others. A unique and rewarding aspect of this role is guiding our incoming 16-18 year old shadow trustee, meaning patience, encouragement, and a willingness to share your knowledge are highly valued.
• Lived Experience and Personal Attributes: We highly value diverse perspectives and welcome applicants who live or work locally within Chipping Norton or the wider Oxfordshire area, giving them a direct connection to the community we serve. You should be a collaborative team player who communicates with clarity and diplomacy.

Above all, you do not need to be an environmental expert, but you must share our passion for building a resilient, sustainable future for our community. Your structured financial mindset will be the foundation that allows our green initiatives to thrive.

Hybrid

What will you be doing? Our board is a dedicated, welcoming, and collaborative team committed to local climate resilience. Following a highly successful period of project growth, we are navigating an exciting transition from a lean, volunteer-driven startup model into a structurally mature organisation.

Our immediate goal is securing core funding to hire our first paid operational staff, ensuring our long-term sustainability. To prepare for this scaling phase, our priority is de-risking our governance. Currently, our Chair is managing a dual Chair and Treasurer role out of operational necessity. For robust governance and risk-management purposes, we want to split these functions out completely.

As our new Treasurer, you will play a pivotal role on the board by serving as the essential financial bridge during this evolution. You will take over the financial leadership of the board, chairing our financial governance, advising on strategic budgeting, and presenting financial clarity to the trustees so we can make confident, data-driven decisions about our reserves and future growth.

Alongside this, you will head an exciting new initiative to recruit a 16-18 year old shadow trustee. This position will give a young local person direct, real-world experience of charity governance, and you will act as their board mentor as they assist with basic finance administration.

What makes this role so exciting is the opportunity to act as both an architect and a mentor. You will be separating executive power on the board, designing the strategic financial structures that our paid staff will inherit once funding is approved, and directly shaping the next generation of charity leaders. If you want a tangible, high-impact role where your expertise leaves a lasting legacy in our community, we would love to have you lead our financial journey.