MODA Vi recently sat down with Kevin L. Nichols, founder and CEO of The Social Engineering Project, to discuss his work expanding access to STEM and the factors that shape educational and career outcomes. The conversation focuses on the role institutions play in creating opportunity, and what it takes to build more consistent pathways into technical careers, a subject that sits directly within the scope of a city-centric think tank concerned with how employment, local investment, and education shape the long term trajectory of cities.
Meet The Social Engineer
Kevin Nichols traces the spirit behind The Social Engineering Project to a line from Charles Hamilton Houston:
“A lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite on society.”
That idea helped shape the work he now leads as founder, president, and CEO of The Social Engineering Project, a nonprofit focused on addressing the lack of diversity in tech and creating stronger pathways into STEM for young people from underrepresented communities.
Kevin L. Nichols Founder & CEO of The Social Engineering Project
“Technically, I’m not a lawyer or an engineer, but the way that I look at the quote is you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.”
Kevin’s Origins
“I’m born and raised in the Bay Area, and my background is primarily in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space. I spent 25 plus years in that space, working in big law firms and helping tech companies create diversity programs.”
Nichols traces the roots of his work to an early love of math and science, a background that led him to begin at UC Berkeley as a mechanical engineering major, and a long standing commitment to youth development. It is no surprise, then, that he would go on to lead an organization devoted to widening access to STEM for underrepresented students.
Through The Social Engineering Project, Nichols has helped build a recurring programming that includes summer STEM camps, overnight conferences, mentorship initiatives. While also securing support from major institutions such as Google.
What inspired you to start the Social Engineering Project?
The start of The Social Engineering Project was not something Nichols originally imagined. “Actually, that moment came rather begrudgingly,” he said. “That was not the moment that I thought it was going to be.” He explained that a friend from high school, who later became a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, had created a program to teach middle school students math, science, chemistry, physics, and traditional STEM subjects. “Because that was part of my background growing up, I decided to help him.”
“That’s kind of how I got involved in doing this work with Stanford, and after we did the grant, we decided to keep doing STEM programs to help young people get interested in pursuing engineering. It wasn’t some grandiose thing. It came out of a unique set of circumstances.”
Where do you see the overlap between strengthening local economies and investing in education?
As his work continued, Nichols became more focused on the structural conditions shaping educational opportunity.
He said, “Well, ironically, local economies, especially when it comes to education, have a very unique role in improving them. A lot of major cities have tech companies and other companies that are created there so that it will entice people to come and live in those communities. So as people move there and they generate wealth, a lot of people are able to buy homes and those property taxes that fund schools are very good, whereas underrepresented and more diverse communities are no longer available or able to live in those areas, so they have to move away in order to afford the kinds of homes that they need to live close to where they work. But also then they have to spend extra money to provide the same type of opportunities as students who live in cities where they're companies, so they're spending money on after school programs, summer enrichment and extracurricular activities. So in order to kind of balance that out, these companies really need to invest and not only the community that they reside in, but also in those surrounding communities, to make it an equal playing field for everyone involved in the area.”
Changing Environment to Change Outcomes
Science in the City (SITC) is a week-long summer STEM day camp typically hosted at Stanford University for rising 5th and 6th grade students.
“Our programs basically remove children from their current environment. So, for example, our overnight camping conferences, we take them from the hustle and bustle of the inner city into a place where their phones don’t work, there’s no Wi-Fi, they’re not able to get online or social media or communicate with the outside world.” He continued, “We teach them mindfulness, and they actually learn yoga when they’re outside. We have a bonfire our first evening. Then we have tech companies come up and lead workshops on what they do for a living. The goal there is basically to say, this is what it looks like on the other side if you put in the hard work.”
From 2011 to 2014, Kevin Nichols appeared on LinkedIn’s homepage, making him one of the featured faces users saw when entering their username and password.
Work and Friendship
The roots of the work also go back to a much longer relationship. “Dr. Brown and I went to high school together,” Nichols said. “We were involved in an organization called the United Black Students of California, which was basically working to empower Black youth throughout the state of California in high school to learn about their history, their culture, and celebrate that, but then also take that information and apply it to whatever endeavor they wanted to do after school.”
He said, “We’ve always been involved in organizing safe and social cultural events for students our age. Giving back has always been a passion of ours. So that relationship has always been there.”
Nichols also made clear maintaining friendships, especially ones rooted in shared purpose, is a critical part of professional development. The same people you grow with, organize with, and build alongside over time become the ones you trust to create, to collaborate, and to carry ideas forward. In that sense, the work is not just built through programs or institutions, but through relationships that are sustained, revisited, and deepened over years.
This is a graph featured on ‘The Social Engineering Project’ about page, titled “Why Are We Here?”
Nichols also pointed to the disparity that made the need for this work impossible to ignore. “Around the time I contemplated starting this organization, there were about 3 percent of African Americans working in the tech industry, in all the social media and tech companies,” he said.
“So clearly, if we represent 12 or 13 percent of the state and the nation, there was a disparity there that no one really could explain why. It wasn’t that there weren't enough of us there. They were just completely being left out of this wealth.”
Bringing Concepts to Life
Our K-4th Grade Serving Program is our Family Science Day at Google’s Headquarters. 5th-12th Graders are also welcome.
He also spoke about the importance of making STEM feel concrete and relatable for students. “What we do is we make math and science relatable to students,” Nichols said. “So if I ask a junior or senior in high school what a derivative is, it’s a very challenging question for them to understand, but if I tell them that the curve from a quarterback throwing a pass to a receiver running a certain speed, that curve is a derivative. So if they can see the math and science in a way that’s relatable to them, they’re far more able to grasp the concepts and be able to do the underlying math or equations around it, because they can visualize what the math looks like in reality.”
Nichols also reflected on how credibility works inside institutions and the tech world. “People in the tech industry, on one hand, didn’t have much respect for me working at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory because they didn’t quite understand its relevance anymore,” he said. “You think of technology now, you think of the Facebooks, the Apples, the Googles. And for my organization particularly, because it may not be a household name or people don’t know it as well, people don’t really have respect or necessarily credibility for it until I say that I raise money from the Googles, the Microsofts, the Salesforces. Then all of a sudden I gain credibility. So in and of itself, you don’t necessarily have credibility. You have to be able to demonstrate excellence and quality of what you’re doing.”
Kevin L. Nichols shared the stage at Dreamforce with Eran Agrios, SVP & GM, Financial Services, Salesforce
What Do Companies Get Wrong?
When speaking about what companies often get wrong, Nichols said, “Companies need to find better ways to promote success with leaders or people that have done good jobs working there, without having to necessarily manage people. Some people are just not good managers. And so the only way that they move up the hierarchy or stay at a company is that they start managing people.” He added, “That philosophy breaks down when you have a terrible manager and people leave or don’t like working for the company and dread going to work. A lot of leaders also don’t even know what their company’s mission is. So without being connected with that directly, misalignment can occur very easily.”
“If you were King of the Bay for a Day - What would you change?
In the end, when asked what he would do if he were king for a day, Nichols did not point first to a technical fix. “If I were the king for a day,” he said, “I would literally be teaching everyone how to be more empathetic and compassionate to their neighbor, and I believe that that becomes viral, and that could literally change the course of how people interact, treat one another, love one another going forward.”
Closing Thoughts…
MODA Vi’s conversation with Kevin L. Nichols leaves a clear set of takeaways. Work and friendship can go hand in hand, that real investment in youth requires making the subject matter relevant to them and that accepting data without questioning the conditions behind it misses the point.
Thanks Kevin, and to our readers, until next time.