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Greenprint

Episode one is out now

Greenprint with Martin Smallhorne

Your zip code does not determine your destiny.

For thirty years, parents came to Martin Smallhorne with the same sentence: my child is behind, now what? Greenprint is that conversation, recorded. The plan for students and families the system has already written off.

What the show isMeet Martin

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The host

Martin Smallhorne

Founder, Urban Coders · 30+ years in NYC public education

Portrait of Martin Smallhorne

Martin was raised by his grandmother in Jamaica while his parents went ahead to America. She gave him discipline, dignity, and the conviction that where a person starts is not where they finish.

At six he boarded a plane to meet his parents for the first time and landed in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Growing up there showed him economic hardship close up, and gave him something the education system rarely has in one person: the ability to speak credibly to a struggling teenager and to a school administrator in the same afternoon.

He spent more than thirty years in NYC public education on the students other people had given up on: the overage, the under-credited, the ones already written off. As founding leader of the Young Adult Borough Center at Lehman High School in the Bronx, he built the second-chance institution he wishes had existed for him. Thousands of students told they would never graduate did. TIME Magazine and ABC 7 covered the work.

After retiring from the Department of Education he founded Urban Coders to answer, at national scale, the question parents had brought him for three decades. Greenprint is where that answer gets said out loud.

“Your zip code does not determine your destiny. Exposure changes everything.”

Martin Smallhorne

The pitch

What Greenprint is

A greenprint is a blueprint that is still being drawn, still argued over, still corrected in the field. Every episode builds one: for the parent who was told to wait and see, the student who was counted out at sixteen, the family nobody handed a plan to. Not inspiration. A plan.

  • No student is too far behind

    The premise of the whole show, and of the thirty years behind it. Overage, under-credited, out of school for a year: none of it is the end of the conversation. Every episode starts from there.

  • For the parents asking 'now what?'

    The question Martin has been handed for three decades. Episodes take it seriously and answer it concretely: what to ask, who to ask, what the system owes you, and what to do when it does not deliver.

  • Exposure, on the record

    Educators, employers, technologists, and people who came up the same way, talking about the doors that exist and how you actually get through them. Exposure is the thing that changes outcomes, so the show manufactures it.

  • Money said out loud

    Financial literacy and generational wealth discussed plainly, without the jargon that keeps families out of the room where those decisions get made.

Years in NYC public education
30+
Students back on track
1000s
In production
S1

The team

Who makes it

Partners

Who we work with

Greenprint sits inside a wider effort. These are the organizations doing the work the show talks about.

Get in touch

Pitch a guest. Or be one.

Guest suggestions, sponsorship, press, or a question you want answered on the record, especially if you are a parent or student sitting on one right now. It all lands in the same inbox and Martin reads it.

Elsewhere

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