Week 3 EOC: Making money for good

Nike has been helping girls since the moment girls wanted to be athletes, they are the ones on which Nike started the Just Do It movement. Now, they have started a new movement. The Nike Foundation leverages the power of insights; innovation and inspiration to stop the cycle of inter-generational poverty. As a company, Nike believes in the power of human potential. In the two minutes it will take for you to read this, 54 girls between the ages of 10 and 18 will give birth. Ninety percent of these girls are child brides. Four of them will die from pregnancy complications. There are 250 million adolescent girls living in poverty today, and we believe they are the most powerful force for change on the planet.  When we include girls in education, health and economic investments, we give them choice and opportunity: choice over when they marry and start having children and opportunity to realize their full economic and social potential. Investing in a girl — before she is married, out of school, pregnant and HIV positive is the ultimate solution to end poverty, not a cure for its symptoms. But girls can't do it alone. They need the world to recognize them, listen to them and invest in their potential. Created by the Nike Foundation in collaboration with the Novo Foundation, United Nations Foundation and Coalition for Adolescent Girls, the girl effect leverages the unique potential of adolescent girls and provides them with resources to end poverty for themselves, their families, their communities, their countries and the world. The Nike Foundation is pioneering a new approach to development by creating insights-driven innovations, strategic partnerships and solutions that can be scaled to enable and equip adolescent girls to realize their potential. When a girl in poverty completes secondary school, marries and has her first child later, she helps to create economic growth, political and social stability.

Early in Nike's work, they issued Requests for Proposals where they noticed gaps in investment, based on what they learned from their partners and other experts. Frequently these involved seed grants or investments to replicate promising programs. Those prior investments helped Nike to understand where the greatest opportunities exist for girls. Their current investments target large-scale systems change that transforms girls’ environments. Nike works closely with our network of partners and collaborators to identify organizations with the capacity to bring about massive change.