Before Code Platoon had a curriculum, a classroom, or a single student, it had a conversation at a Starbucks.
Rod Levy — Code Platoon's Founder and Executive Director, but then just fresh out of his own coding boot camp — sat down with Jill Greer — a nonprofit professional who'd built organizations from scratch and whose husband had served in the Navy — to pressure-test an idea: teach Veterans to code, and help an underserved community transition into good, lasting careers. "What I remember most was the extreme passion he had for this," Jill says. "He wanted to do good in the world, and he saw this population as being underserved."
That conversation, and the founding board of five it grew into, is where Code Platoon's story actually starts. Ten years and 700 graduates later, we sat down with Jill to reflect on what it took to get here — and why, as we celebrate a decade of impact, the fundamentals she helped build still hold.
The founding board's instinct wasn't to move fast. It was to get it right. "We were beta testing our own product," Jill says of Code Platoon's first cohort — nine students, not the hundreds the mission could eventually reach. Before that first class started, the board spent a year and a half laying groundwork: legal structure, financial controls, governance, funding. Only then did they let the team focus on curriculum and students.
Jill's reasoning was simple, and it's the same case she'd make to any donor today: "We were asking military Veterans to take time off from their families and jobs to spend 80 hours a week with us. We better deliver a product that gets them a job at the end of it." That sense of obligation — to students and to funders alike — is what she calls being a fiduciary. "When people give money to a charity, they're making an investment," she says. "They want to know we're going to be good stewards of it, and do something productive with it."
It's easy for a nonprofit to chase every good idea until none of them get done well, Jill says. Code Platoon's discipline — sticking to what it does best while staying nimble enough to adapt — is what she credits for a decade of staying power. The curriculum has shifted with the industry (AI barely existed when Code Platoon started; now it shapes nearly everything taught). The format expanded from in-person only to include remote cohorts. What hasn't changed is the board's insistence on listening — to students through exit interviews, to staff, to alumni — before making the next move. "This organization has to survive past Rod, past all of us," Jill says. "It has to stand on its own footing."
Jill's hope for the next ten years isn't a pivot — it's more of the same, at greater scale. More veterans reached, and maybe a model that extends beyond Chicago. The honest challenge, she says, is that Code Platoon runs almost entirely on grants and philanthropy, both of which shift with the political and economic winds. "We never slow down, we never stop, and we never get complacent in our fundraising," she says. That candor is exactly why the mission has held up for ten years — and why it needs support to hold for ten more.
We're marking ten years of this work at Celebrate Code Platoon, an in-person event on September 23, 2026, at Chicago's City Winery. RSVP to join us here, and if you can't make it in person, you can still be part of the next decade. Give to Code Platoon here and help us keep the promise Jill and the founding board made ten years ago.