Significant Brands

Significant Brand #1: NIKE

I couldn’t think of a better brand to choose for my first “Significant Brands” blog than Nike. As one of the world’s largest brands, they take a lot of flak for many things (not all of them un-justifiable), but for the purposes of this tumblr I want to focus on the side of brands that you don’t get to see very often…

The people stories. The foundations. The causes. The lives changed. The communities impacted. And not just because some brand decided to tick a CSR box or offset some of their tax ~ but because they genuinely wanted to make a difference.

So for my first post, here’s a story about the Nike Foundation. A foundation obsessed with improving the lives of teen girls. And since tumblr is often accused of having the largest teen girl user base in the world, I can’t think of a better place to begin…

Since Nike was founded in 1964, the brand has always endeavoured to believe in the power of human potential. According to Nike Foundation’s mission statement, they “invest in the greatest unrealized source of human potential in the world today: adolescent girls”.

In the three minutes it takes to read this, 81 adolescent girls will become child brides, and 96 adolescent girls will give birth. Two of those girls will likely die from complications in childbirth.

The reality is harsh, but Nike don’t see the 250 million adolescent girls living in poverty today as victims of circumstance. They believe they can play a crucial role in solving the toughest problems facing the world. Because when a girl living in poverty has the chance to reach her full potential, she isn’t the only one who escapes the circumstances she was born into. She brings her family, community and country with her.

Why Girls?

In the 1990s, research from the Population Council and International Center for Research on Women began to show that when an adolescent girl in poverty is able to stay in school, delay marriage and delay having children, not only do her life chances radically change, but the children she will later have are far more likely to be healthy and educated.

The data available today is compelling. With nearly four million new adolescent mothers every year, India loses $383 billion in potential lifetime income. If Ethiopian girls completed high school, the economy would gain $6.8 billion over their lifetimes. If young Nigerian women had the same employment rates as young men, the country would add $13.9 billion to its economy every year. Investing in girls is not only the right thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do.

Why Nike?

Nike has always been a company focused on human potential. Co-founder and track coach Bill Bowerman was a relentless innovator, obsessed with giving athletes the training and equipment they needed to maximize their performance. At the Nike Foundation, Maria Eitel took the bold decision to apply this philosophy to perhaps the world’s most isolated and marginalized people: the 250 million adolescent girls living in extreme poverty.

When the Nike Foundation started in 2004, they sought the best investment to end global poverty with the highest returns. They traced poverty back to its roots. Investing in adolescent girls was the unexpected solution to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty and unleash the unlimited potential of adolescent girls on the world. Nike believe they can stop poverty before it starts by getting to the mother of every child that will be born into poverty before that first child is born.

The Results So Far…

In 2008, the Nike Foundation partnered with the NoVo Foundation, United Nations Foundation and Coalition for Adolescent Girls to create the Girl Effect. To learn more about the Girl Effect ~ check out their site ~ http://www.girleffect.org

Nike Foundation’s investments have so far directly helped more than 500,000 girls around the world to fulfill their potential, providing grants to more than 100 organizations in more than 80 countries over nine years — including: giving girls in Nigeria the chance to stay in school; helping girls in India to claim equal rights to inherit and own land; and giving girls across Rwanda critical health information and mentoring.

This is all important stuff. And MUCH more important than just selling shoes.

So, thanks for reading.