In addressing social innovations, I am very keen to make better known those that specifically address plight of girls around the world, especially when the social action is led by a woman! If it happens to be supported by a company like Nike, even better. The lecture below is really interesting and I encourage you to listen all the way through the end – some of the most enlightening points, at least for me, emerged in Maria Eitel’s answers to student questions.
I know there is a lot of cynicism involved in activities of large companies related to their efforts around the world – I prefer to judge each on their merits.
Social Innovation Conversations: Maria Eitel
Nike’s Efforts to Empower Young Girls Maria Eitel
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[runtime: 00:49:56, 22.9 mb, recorded 2007-05-11]
Nike has taken pains to clean up its act since the media brought public attention to human rights violations in its supplier factories in the 1990s. Now, through the Nike Foundation, the sports and fitness giant is taking a proactive approach to some of the world’s most challenging social problems. Foundation president Maria Eitel talks about how the organization is focusing on creating economic opportunities for adolescent girls around the world as a means of alleviating poverty.
Maria Eitel was the person hired in 1998 to help Nike deal with the highly publicized worker rights violations taking place in its outsourced factories around the world. In this talk, sponsored by the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, Eitel discusses her strategy for approaching that enormous problem among suppliers in 55 countries. She then details how, after helping the organization successfully address its systemic difficulties in that arena, she moved Nike in the direction of becoming a force for social change by using its foundation as an organ to address challenges in the field of development. She discusses the foundation’s business-oriented approach to creating opportunities that are pulling young girls off the track to poverty, and putting them on the road to economic empowerment.
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