Chief Financial Officer
Arlington, VA
Finance /
Full-Time /
On-site
The Opportunity:
We are looking for a CFO who sees beyond the numbers—a strategic architect who understands how finance fuels innovation, scales impact, and drives sustainable global growth. This is not a traditional finance role. We need a leader who can navigate complexity, empower teams, and build financial systems that unlock bold ideas rather than restrict them.
If you’ve built or grown an organization from early stages to large-scale impact, led dynamic teams, and believe in the power of networks, this is a rare opportunity to take on a high-impact global challenge. The CFO will collaborate with teams worldwide and serve as a thought partner to the CEO and the Ashoka Board.
What You'll Do:
- Shape the financial vision to support Ashoka’s mission, ensuring sustainability without stifling innovation.
- Turn financial insights into action—develop tools like the Manager’s Dashboard to help regional and program leaders make bold, data-driven decisions.
- Advise the CEO and senior leadership, bringing a financial lens to strategy, growth, and impact.
- Build a financial framework for scale, guiding Ashoka’s growth strategy while ensuring agility, transparency, and accountability.
- Design and manage the annual and five-year financial roadmap, ensuring resources align with Ashoka’s biggest opportunities.
- Champion a culture of financial empowerment, ensuring teams at all levels have the tools to think like investors in Ashoka’s future.
What You Bring:
- CPA required.
- Master’s degree in Finance or Accounting; MBA strongly preferred.
- Experience leading financial strategy in decentralized, global, innovation-driven, and mission-driven social sector organizations.
- Exceptional communication skills, with the ability to translate financial complexity into clear, compelling insights that drive action.
- A builder’s mindset—someone who has started or led pattern-changing ventures and knows how to create financial systems that enable, rather than constrain, growth.
- Experience growing an organization from ~$50M to larger global scale.
Core Criteria:
- Entrepreneurial Quality: Compelled to take creative initiative and ownership (e.g. founding an organization or company, starting a movement, or re-shaping the work of an existing organization). Demonstrates relentless and realistic how-to-thinking and passion for seeing their ideas come to life.
- Understanding and Belief in the Everyone a Changemaker: Understands and believes the Everyone a Changemaker vision at a gut level. To be able to innately ‘get’ this, candidates should have a broad and inquisitive intellectual and a thinking pattern that connects the dots between historical trends and current social context.
- Emotional and Social Intelligence: Ability to work efficiently and respectfully in teams, putting organizational/team goal first (personal glory second).
- Ethical Fiber: Exceptionally strong ethical behavior. Is self-reflective and has strong empathy skills. Trustworthy.
- Self-Definition: The person expects that changing the world in big ways and on a continental scale is what he/she will do in life.
About Ashoka:
Ashoka is the world’s largest community of leading social entrepreneurs, having pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship over 40 years ago. We support a robust network of more than 4,000 Ashoka Fellows in 90 countries who have successfully implemented systems-changing solutions to human and environmental problems globally. By learning from and collaborating with our Fellows and other social entrepreneurs, Ashoka identifies patterns and key levers to help society gain a new framework for living in the world as a changemaker.
Our current work is centered around the "Everyone a Changemaker" (EACH) movement, which stems from our belief that everyone has the potential and responsibility to make positive change in an ever-changing world. We continue to grow a global movement of social entrepreneurship, recognizing that the rate of change is accelerating and our problems are growing faster than our solutions.
