Sevetri Wilson Taylor and Sheena Allen sit down with Dr. Calvin Mackie, award-winning mentor, inventor, author, former Tulane engineering professor, and founder of STEM NOLA and STEM Global Action in New Orleans. Dr. Mackie has spent over a decade building one of the most impactful STEM education movements in the country, exposing Black and Brown students in under-resourced communities to hands-on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

He breaks down why STEM equity is not just an education issue but an economic and entrepreneurial one, what it takes to build an organization that outlasts its founder, how Hurricane Katrina reshaped his understanding of community resilience and institutional failure, and why the gap between what students in wealthy school districts receive and what students in under-resourced communities get is nothing short of educational malpractice.

A conversation about legacy, access, and what it actually means to build something for the people who need it most.

What You'll Take Away

This episode is for every entrepreneur, educator, parent, and community builder who believes that access to STEM is access to economic power and that the current system is not fairly distributing that access.

Dr. Calvin Mackie has been doing the work in New Orleans and across the country since 2013, long before STEM equity became a talking point. You will walk away understanding why under-resourced communities are not failing STEM but STEM education systems are failing them, how Dr. Mackie built STEM NOLA from the ground up and scaled it to 125,000 students without losing the community-first mission, what the intersection of entrepreneurship and STEM education actually looks like when someone is doing it right, and why Hurricane Katrina, and the institutional failures it exposed, became the defining turning point in his commitment to building something that could not be taken away.

If you care about equity, education, and building organizations that create lasting impact, this is the blueprint.