Director of Resident Well-Being

Student housing sits at an unusual intersection: it's a real estate operation, but the residents are 18-to-22-year-olds living away from home for the first time, often under academic and social pressure that property management teams aren't trained to handle. Scion built a national portfolio of off-campus student communities, and this role exists because the gap between "property concern" and "mental health concern" is narrower than most operators acknowledge. The Director of Resident Well-Being is the person who closes that gap at scale.

What This Role Actually Does

This is a strategy and infrastructure role, not a clinical one. The posting is explicit about that boundary, and it matters. You won't be counseling residents, diagnosing anything, or stepping in as a crisis responder. What you will do is build the systems, training, and partnerships that make sure a General Manager at a Scion property in any market knows what to do at 11pm when a resident's roommate calls the front desk worried. That's the real deliverable: confident, protocol-equipped teams who can recognize a concern, document it correctly, and connect a resident to the right resource without overstepping.

The external partnership work is substantial. You'll maintain relationships with university counseling centers, Dean of Students offices, Behavioral Intervention Teams, campus police, disability services, and community crisis-response agencies. Each university market has its own referral pathways and escalation contacts, and keeping those maps current and usable for field teams is ongoing work. On the internal side, you'll partner with Learning and Development to build role-specific training for GMs, regional leaders, and security personnel, and you'll sit alongside Legal, Risk Management, Operations, and HR when a significant incident requires coordinated response.

The resident-facing programming side covers a real range: transition to college, belonging, academic pressure, financial wellbeing, roommate conflict, substance misuse awareness, and crisis-resource literacy. You'll also develop peer-connection strategies, including resident ambassador and wellness champion programs, with careful attention to keeping peer leaders in a connection role rather than a counseling one.

Who Fits This Role

• At least 10 years of progressive leadership in student affairs, student success, wellness administration, public health, higher education, or behavioral health administration
• A bachelor's degree in a relevant discipline (psychology, higher education administration, social work, public health, organizational development); an advanced degree is preferred
• Demonstrated experience building enterprise-wide programs and training frameworks, not just individual initiatives
• Real familiarity with college-age populations, student development theory, FERPA and privacy considerations, and the professional boundaries around non-clinical wellness roles
• Background in student housing, residential life, or counseling-services administration is a meaningful advantage
• Licensed clinical credentials aren't required and won't substitute for the leadership and program-building experience this role demands

The candidates who will stand out aren't necessarily the ones with the most clinical depth. They're the ones who've built programs that actually got adopted at scale, who know how to train non-clinical staff to respond appropriately without overreaching, and who've managed the politics of university partnerships where Scion is a private operator sitting adjacent to a campus bureaucracy. That relationship management skill is harder to teach than wellness content knowledge.

This role is based in Chicago and covers Scion's national portfolio. The work will involve real-time guidance during incidents, which means occasional after-hours coordination when something significant happens at a property. That's worth knowing going in.