Meet Nicholas Haystings of Scholars Playground

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicholas Haystings.

Nicholas, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Me and my team have been working in the education and access business for several years now across multiple endeavors. We began in northern California with Square Root Academy before expanding services throughout the region within four and a half years. Our primary focus is to ensure all youth have access to high-quality STEAM-based education and not limited to the resources solely provided by traditional academic institutions. With this mission in mind, we now provide this offering to over 3,000 youth at no cost, in the very communities we hope to reach to ensure true access.

Additionally, we founded the Scholars’ Playground online learning platform to meet the current needs of scholars to be connected to diverse subject matter through distance learning. This collective of non-traditional educators provides free education in a multitude of topics from mindfulness to music production and everything in between.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Absolutely not – the thing with entrepreneurship is there is always a learning curve. My background is in engineering so the transition into more educational based endeavors was an interesting one with both its pros and cons. They say those most poised from disrupting industries tend to come in with an outside perspective, typically from a different industry and that was in perfect alignment with what we hoped to accomplish. Rather than follow the status quo, we took engineering principles and methodologies and applied them to fixing the seemingly non-existent K – career STEAM pipeline for youth coming from underserved backgrounds and those typically not present in the profession. With Scholars’ Playground, we expanded upon this goal creating the platform funded out of pocket in the middle of a pandemic. We created the model, designed the platform, and formed the collaborative in the span of weeks to ensure the needs of our scholars were still being met in the midst of everything going on.

Please tell us what you are most proud of between the two organizations.
That’s a tough question since I’m so proud of everything our teams have accomplished, but if you boil it down I think there are a few commonalities. In many rooms of recognized talent, it tends to be absent of minorities and women but in the spheres our youth enter it is quite the inverse. Our served population through Square Root Academy is around 97% minority and 42% girls which is unheard of for a STEAM based program in both our state and throughout the nation – but all made possible through intentional accessibility. Our kids are amassing college credit, securing internships with industry leaders, and learning advanced coding techniques all before they are old enough to have a driver’s license. I am extremely proud of what our scholars have accomplished with us so far and am even more excited in envisioning what the future holds for them.

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Nothing. Everything that I’ve done has led me here and I’m extremely grateful for the position. Every no, closed-door, and opportunity not awarded are now just integrated into the story and a pivotal part to making me, me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://scholarsplayground.org/ | https://www.squarerootacademy.com/
• Phone: 9168735002
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/squarerootacademy/ | https://www.instagram.com/scholarsplayground/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Squarerootacademy/ | https://www.facebook.com/scholarsplayground/

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