Coach-to-Scholar ratio
Our target by FY2031. Fewer Scholars per coach means more attention on each one. It's also what gates how fast we can grow.
The next five years,
on the record.
Greenwood Project enters this plan in the strongest position in its history. The model works. The record is below. What the next five years decide is how far we take it.
Scholars trained since 2016
transition into high-trajectory roles
average starting salary
That is the record. This plan isn't about proving the model works. We just did that. It's about how far we can take it without breaking the thing that makes it work.
Four commitments carry the next five years.
Growing the program
Greenwood started with five Scholars. This year, roughly 200 will graduate. By 2031, we intend that number to be more than 550, every year.
That is not a straight line, and it was never meant to be. The early years were about finding a model that worked. The last three were about rebuilding it. We stretched training from four weeks to twelve months. We brought in coaches who'd actually held the roles they're coaching toward. And we started recruiting Scholars early enough to compete on the timeline the industry actually runs on.
Scholars graduating each year
Scholars graduating
5
20
200
550+
Selected years. 2026 is where the program stands today; 2031 is the target this plan commits to.
Economic mobility created each year
Economic mobility each year
$0.5M
$2M
$20M
$55M
Derived, not measured: each graduating class multiplied by a $100K average starting salary. The vision is $100M a year.
The second chart is the reason the first one matters. Every Scholar who starts at roughly $100,000 is carrying that income into a community that has been locked out of it, and that effect compounds across a career, not just a paycheck. At more than 550 Scholars a year, we're generating on the order of $55 million in economic mobility annually. We're aiming at $100 million, year after year.
We grow deliberately. Each year, before we commit to the next step, we look hard at what the program is actually delivering.
Quality first
Growth is the easy half of a plan to write, and the easy half to get wrong. A program that doubles while its outcomes slip hasn't grown. It's diluted. The quality standard sets the pace here, not growth.
These are the measures we hold ourselves to, and report to our board every year.
High-trajectory attainment
The share of Scholars who land roles that require a degree, start at $60,000 or more, and open real upward mobility from there.
Starting salary floor
The minimum a role must pay to count as a high-trajectory outcome. Right now our Scholars average roughly $92,000. We're aiming at $100,000.
Scholar satisfaction
We survey Scholars on the program, their coaching, and the support around both. Every cohort gets reviewed, and if something drops, we act on it before the next one starts.
Offers beyond our partners
Whether Scholars win roles at firms that have no relationship with Greenwood at all. If they only win where we already have one, we're not running a training program. We're running a referral program.
Partner satisfaction
Firms fund the program, hire our Scholars, and watch how they perform on the job. That's the real test. Partners who stick around and deepen their commitment are the clearest signal we have that the training holds up.
The AI-enabled Scholar,
the AI-enabled organization
AI isn't going to remove the roles our Scholars are training for. It's going to change what it takes to win them and hold them, at every level of seniority.
Here's our thesis: the most valuable professionals in financial services will be the ones who can direct and manage AI, not just use it. AI fluency won't stay a specialty. It becomes a baseline expectation, the way spreadsheet fluency did a generation ago. A Scholar starting training today won't enter the market until the end of this plan. Preparing them for the job as it looks right now would be a failure of foresight, not a strategy.
We intend to be the organization that gets this right first, and we're building it on both sides at once: inside the organization and inside the classroom. Greenwood runs on these tools internally. That's the only honest basis for teaching them: we don't put anything in front of a Scholar that our own team hasn't done first.
They build and direct real tools inside their own academy's work, not toy exercises in a chat window. By graduation, every Scholar can do four things.
Deconstruct
Break complex work into steps an agent can carry, and know which steps should never leave a human.
Set the bar
Define what good looks like before the work starts. Writing that brief is the hard part, and it's the part that decides whether the output is worth anything.
Interrogate
Judge what comes back, and know when it's wrong. We assess Scholars on how they directed the work, not just on what it produced.
Own it
Assemble the pieces into finished work they can stand behind, and put their name on it.
Scholars do this work in a real development environment, not a chat window, and they earn that judgment by hand before they automate it. That's what makes them able to tell when the machine is wrong.
What we will not do
A plan is defined as much by what it rules out as by what it commits to. These are deliberate choices about where our capacity goes, not gaps we haven't gotten around to.
No second city
All training is virtual. We'd rather make one program excellent than run two average ones.
No new academies
Three academies cover the range of paths we can genuinely prepare Scholars for. A fourth would just compete with the other three for coaching time and curriculum attention.
No high school programming
We ran it. The data showed limited impact compared to intervening at the college level. So we moved the resources.
No growth we cannot fund
Every increase is gated on coaching capacity and the funding to support it. We don't grow first and figure out the rest later.
“We hold ourselves to a standard: if we tell a Scholar we can prepare them for a path, there must be a high probability they succeed on it.”Kwesi Smith, CEO
Here's the arithmetic we've set for ourselves: 1,000 Scholars, $100K jobs, $100M in economic mobility, year after year. This plan is the part of it we're committing to now.