Greenwood Project gets there early

Frankie Gomez found his way to finance through the television. As a child, he watched the Spanish-language news with his family, fascinated by the red and green arrows in the business report. Years later, he was a summer analyst at Deutsche Bank in New York. Between the arrows and the analyst desk came a less visible education: someone showing him how this particular world worked.

Gomez, a first-generation college student from Chicago’s South Side, joined Greenwood Project after meeting an alumnus. His coach, Erika Thomas, helped him prepare for investment banking interviews and connected him with a separate CME Group Foundation scholarship when tuition became a problem. He interned first at Wind Point Partners. His next internship, at Deutsche Bank, came outside Greenwood’s program. That second move matters: preparation had become portable.

The advantage arrives on a calendar

Greenwood’s premise is that financial services recruiting rewards information acquired remarkably early. Students with industry connections may already know which internships lead to full-time work and when applications open. Others can earn good grades and still discover the timetable after important recruiting windows have closed. Hard work cannot recover a deadline you never knew existed.

The nonprofit recruits freshmen and trains students during sophomore year. Its beneficiaries are college students, with a focus on Black and Latino students; employers participate as funders, volunteers and potential recruiters. In the market for career preparation, Greenwood sits between a university’s broad career office and an employer’s own recruitment program. Its subject is specific: getting ready to compete for financial services work.

“They’re not underqualified. They’re out of the loop.”

Kwesi Smith, CEO

That framing makes the work concrete. Explain the recruiting schedule. Practice the interview. Teach how professional relationships form. Help a student recognize that an informal conversation can carry professional consequences. These are teachable activities, even when families and workplaces usually transmit them without a syllabus.

Five students, then a harder choice

Bevon and Elois Joseph founded Greenwood in 2016 with five students. The husband-and-wife team brought financial industry experience to a problem they understood: students needed both skills and people who could help them navigate the profession. The name honors Tulsa’s Greenwood district, historically known as Black Wall Street, a community whose businesses and homes were destroyed in the 1921 race massacre.

Early work included high school students. In 2022, funding from Citadel and Citadel Securities supported plans to double the summer FinTech Institute to 60 participants. That made intuitive sense: introduce careers early, expand the pool, help students imagine a different future.

Greenwood subsequently stopped high school programming. Its strategic plan gives an unusually direct reason: the data showed less impact than intervention at college level. Resources moved accordingly. The same plan describes another substantial change, extending training from four weeks to twelve months. Exposure had given way to sustained preparation aligned with actual hiring.

Finance comes in three flavors

The current program begins with professional clarity: strengths, values and a considered career choice. Scholars then specialize. Investment Banking teaches modeling, valuation and deal analysis. Sales & Relationship Management develops listening, a sales process and client coverage skills. Fintech addresses market structure, data, systems, regulation and risk, preparing students for paths including technology, operations, audit and cybersecurity.

Independent coursework feeds into live sessions every other week. Capstones test what Scholars can do with the material. Coaches have worked in financial services and stay involved through the year. Expect 20 to 40 hours a month. For a student balancing classes and paid work, free training still consumes a scarce resource: time.

The bill behind “free”

Students pay no tuition or fees. Training itself is unpaid; a secured internship is paid. Greenwood also offers travel, housing and professional wardrobe support to Scholars who need it. An offer in another city can otherwise create an immediate financing problem, well before the first salary payment arrives.

Corporate giving helps carry that bill. In April 2024, IG North America and tastytrade announced a $600,000 commitment supporting Greenwood’s expansion, learning resources, targeted recruitment and coaching. Its fiscal 2025 filing reports about $2.61 million in revenue and $2.44 million in expenses. Contributions supplied 98.5% of revenue. This is a donor-supported training organization whose ability to grow depends on continuing support.

Tomorrow’s analyst gets a terminal

The curriculum now includes AI agent management in Claude Code, backed by funded enterprise accounts. Scholars learn to break work into tasks, define a useful result, examine the output and take responsibility for finished work. Greenwood’s wager is that directing these tools will become ordinary professional competence. Teaching judgment alongside access is a sensible response to a moving job description.

There are boundaries. Current admissions focus on freshmen at four-year institutions, with GPA thresholds that vary by academy. Community college students are not currently eligible. Internships are not guaranteed. Students must have time to participate, and Greenwood needs enough experienced coaches to sustain the attention its model promises.

Other educators can copy the sequence: map hiring deadlines backward, make workplace conventions explicit and budget for accepting an opportunity. The money, coaching and timing belong together. Gomez’s second internship offers the useful test. Eventually, the student has to walk into a room the organization did not arrange, answer the questions and earn the next invitation.