Obama Nominates Nike Foundation President for CEO of Corporation for National and Community Service

Published April 23, 2009 @ 01:20PM PT

Just a few days ago, President Obama nominated Nike Foundation President Maria Eitel to run the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS)

CNCS is in charge of a variety of programs, including the AmeriCorps program. Under the new Serve America Act, the program is supposed to grow from 75,000 to 250,000 placements, with an emphasis on filling unmeet needs in "an Education Corps; a Healthy Futures Corps; a Clean Energy Corps and a Veterans Corps."

President Obama said, "I am pleased to announce my intent to nominate Maria Eitel to be CEO for the Corporation for National and Community Service. Maria brings a unique blend of skills and management experience that will help her successfully lead the Corporation during our Administration’s bold expansion of national service programs. Maria is genuinely passionate about the role of national and community service as a vehicle for engaging and mobilizing citizens in social change, and will bring new, creative thinking to the growth and mission of the Corporation."

Eitel has an interesting and diverse background:

Maria Eitel is the President of the Nike Foundation and a Vice President of NIKE, Inc. As president of the Nike Foundation, she has lead the Foundation’s work to increase opportunities for the world’s most disadvantaged girls.

Prior to becoming the Foundation’s first president, Ms. Eitel served as Nike Inc.’s first vice president for corporate responsibility, leading the development and implementation of the company’s first corporate responsibility agenda.

Before Nike, Ms. Eitel served as European corporate affairs group manager for Microsoft Corporation where she managed corporate, public and community affairs for the company’s European headquarters. Prior to Microsoft, she worked with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and MCI Communications Corp.

This seems to me to bode well for collaboration between CNCS and the Office of Social Innovation, which will be led by fomer Google.orger Sonal Shah. Some of their work will overlap, and having a strong CNCS leader with some experience on the corporate and foundation side of things could make that working relationship easier. At the same time, it means that the two biggest social innovation positions are filled by folks who have historically been more on the funding side of the coin, rather than doing a lot of field-level development themselves.

Still, lots of people I respect immensely like Jacqueline Novogratz are thrilled with the announcement, and I've been impressed with Eitel's work with The Girl Effect. I would love to see of some of the passion and media savvy they've brought to that campaign infiltrate this new role. Congrats Maria - we're looking forward to seeing you in action!

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Author

Nathaniel is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, which works annually with hundreds of students in dozens of countries around the world through curricular programs and student project incubation.