CFO & VP of Sustainability

Organizational Overview:

College Unbound (CU) is an accredited and state-approved college whose mission is to reinvent the higher education experience for underrepresented returning adult learners. Through rigorous and engaged scholarship, College Unbound integrates students’ own purposes for learning with the needs of their workplaces and communities, improving the lives of the students and the lives of those they touch. Started in RI, College Unbound now supports students across multiple states and looks to continue to develop an infrastructure to support strategic growth and long‑term sustainability.

For College Unbound, “sustainability” is not about remaining what we are as an institution but about continually reasserting what we need to be in order to ensure students can thrive as full participants in their learning. The VP of Institutional & Student Sustainability is a critical partner in helping the college build capacity to get there and to steward the institution to its next iteration.

Reporting to the President and serving as Chief Financial Officer, the Vice President of Sustainability is a core member of the College’s leadership team, championing institution‑wide sustainability initiatives that advance our mission and empower students to lead in building a more sustainable future. The CFO & Vice President of Sustainability facilitates the strategic alignment of student, institutional, and community priorities; ensuring the College functions in a manner that is authentic to the equity imperative that drives College Unbound’s student success work.

The individual in this unique position is responsible for ensuring the College can effectively support and advance programmatic initiatives that promote student success, as well as the development, implementation, and maintenance of the necessary operational, administrative, and financial infrastructure of the College to support a thriving community and institution with national impact.

The VP of Sustainability acts as the Chief Financial Officer of the college by overseeing the business and finance operations of the college (strategic oversight of financial accounting, payroll, accounts payable/accounts receivable, tax, grant accounting, compliance, bursar functions), as well as areas of the College that support operational success in service of student success. The VP of Sustainability also helps the college move toward new financial models and technological services that are not yet in place but may support the values of CU and the needs of its students, faculty, and staff.

Possibility and imagination drive the work of this role as much as the current realities of the school and its allocation of resources.

Goal #2 in College Unbound’s Strategic Plan points to how CU can grow into a Sustainable Institution with Systems that Foster Equity and Student Success. To advance that mission, the work of the Vice President of Sustainability is grounded in the following values:

• Relationality – learning and growing in the context of kinship and community.
• Social Justice – advancing human rights, access, participation, and equity.
• Accountability – holding ourselves responsible for understanding and transforming behaviors that do not advance individual and community well-being.

• What resources do we need to be a sustainable institution? How do we garner resources from entities that are aligned with our values?
• How do we work with students, alumni, and community collaborators to better understand how we might better align institutional operations and functions with what “equity” and “student success” look like over time?
• Which funding partnerships advance equity and which inadvertently perpetuate inequity?
• If we are resources to one another, how do our notions of “sustainability” shift? What does intersectional investment in people look like?
• What could it mean to steward the college to its next iteration and through its next strategic plan?

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