Strategic Treasurer 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.

First and foremost, your appointment solves a critical governance vulnerability by cleanly separating the roles of Chair and Treasurer. This immediately restores the necessary checks and balances to our board, aligning Sustainable Chipping Norton with standard Charity Commission best practice and giving external funders complete confidence in our independent oversight.

Furthermore, 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 exact operational blueprint our paid staff will inherit once our core funding is secured.

Finally, 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.

• 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…