Calvin Mackie arrived for breakfast at the Mid-City Ruby Slipper one recent Saturday morning wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of STEM NOLA and donning a Morehouse College cap.

He apologized for running a few minutes late and explains that he’d just run into Al Collins, head coach at the Patrick F. Taylor Science & Technology Academy, where both of Mackie’s sons, Myles and Mason, went to high school.

Collins had wanted to chat about Mason’s valedictorian speech earlier this year when he graduated with a 4.91 grade point average and to congratulate Mackie on Mason’s winning a place at Yale University, where he’ll be majoring in economics. They also chatted about how older son Myles was doing at Howard University, where he is a Karsh STEM Scholar and a junior in the mechanical engineering program.

Mackie wears his passion for education on his sleeve, literally, and he misses no opportunity to proselytize for wider access to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. He wants to foster in kids the same kind of expectations that his sons had.

“I like to call myself an ‘eduvangelist,’” he says with a gleam in his eye. “I like to preach about the value of education.”

After a decade building STEM NOLA and becoming an in-demand public figure, Mackie’s story is by now familiar to many New Orleanians.

Mackie came from a big extended family of strivers, the foundation for which was Mackie’s dad Willie and uncle Earl, who set out from St. Francisville after Hurricane Betsy in the mid-1960s to set up a roofing company in New Orleans.

Calvin Mackie overcame an undiagnosed reading disability (he thinks it might have been mild dyslexia) to win a place at Morehouse, where he earned a degree in mathematics. He went on to earn bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In the mid-1990s, Mackie became a professor of mechanical engineering at Tulane University, populating his office with African-themed art he has been collecting since he was a student. He met his wife-to-be, Tracy Ransom, a Xavier University pharmacy graduate, at a wedding. With the two boys who came later, the Mackies might have settled into a comfortable life of academia had it not been for Hurricane Katrina, whose devastation included the shuttering of four of Tulane’s engineering schools, including the one where Mackie taught.

Facing an uncertain future in New Orleans, the Mackies contemplated an offer to move away and make a new life in Atlanta. But Mackie said he chose to stay.

He said the possibility of moving to Atlanta reminded him of a time when he was young and was offered a place at a prestigious boarding school.

“They wanted to pluck me out of my community to admit me to a boarding school in the northeast,” he recalls. “Do you know how different I’d be if I’d done that? But I thought why have they got to pluck me out of my community to give me something of value?”

He invested $100,000 of his own money to get STEM NOLA going but still struggled to get support early on — he was turned down by Idea Village, the accelerator for budding New Orleans entrepreneurs. But later he found support at Propeller, an accelerator with a mission to specifically target Black and other underrepresented members of the community with ideas for nonprofit and for-profit businesses.

STEM NOLA has been on a sharp trajectory in recent years, taking a big step up in 2021 with the acquisition of a 43,000-square-foot building in New Orleans East, a result of a partnership with Ochsner, one of STEM NOLA’s principal backers.

Among STEM NOLA’s other big wins are a $1 million partnership with Boeing, which sponsors Rocket Day and other aerospace-themed educational efforts. The last one in July had more than 600 attendees, Mackie said, including 100 engineers and other Boeing employees mingling with kids and their parents at the University of New Orleans event.

As a much-in-demand public speaker, Mackie likes to illustrate his mission with anecdotes. He tells of an older woman who attended Rocket Day with family members and made a point of telling him how much she appreciated that they had arranged to have good toilets rather than “porta potty” rentals.

“It’s about bringing respect to the community, giving them an organized and professional experience where they maybe have been used to getting the leftovers,” he said. “Our expertise is in engaging the community in a way that they’ve never seen it done before.”

Though STEM NOLA has established itself locally and has branched out nationally and overseas through STEM Global Action partnering initiative, Mackie is not satisfied. He says the nonprofit has plateaued in the last two years and needs additional sponsors so he can hire senior staff to help take it to the next level.

“I’m going after the Saints. I’m going after (Gayle) Benson,” he said of plans to convince both the local NFL team and the national organization to back him in the same way that the National Basketball Association has. The NBA is partnering with STEM NOLA to teach about all the various ways science, tech and math are part of basketball, from the medical and sports science element to the finances and statistics essential to managers in the sport.

“It’s a value proposition for them,” Mackie explains. “It’s easy to give someone $1,000 to give out turkeys or something. But we don’t want a handout, we want an investment.”

Mackie checks off several recent partnerships and ones in the offing. There is a deal with the University of Minnesota for an upcoming heart and circulatory day. It won’t just be medical students dissecting a sheep’s heart with the kids. That’s just the science part, he said. There will also be 3D printing modeling a heart to show the technology. Also, the University of Minnesota’s medical engineering department has a display allowing kids to walk around inside a heart.

“We’ve shown the community what STEM really is rather than what people have been offering them,” Mackie said.

He’s then onto another thought about how to improve the offering: “I’ve never been able to find a sponsor for our wind power day.”