April 21, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
President Obama today announced he will nominate Maria Eitel, president of the Nike Foundation, to be chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Ms. Eitel, who is also vice president of Nike, will succeed David Eisner, who stepped down from the post in November. She previously served as the company’s first vice president for corporate responsibility and helped the shoe manufacturer repair its image after being criticized for its labor practices.
At the Nike Foundation, she is credited with refocusing the organization on assisting adolescent girls in developing countries. Last year, the Nike fund and the NoVo Foundation, which is run by Peter Buffett, together pledged $100-million to help organizations that work with girls and young women in poor regions of the world. (Read The Chronicle’s article about the commitment.)
At the time, Mr. Buffett, who is the son of financier Warren Buffett, said Ms. Eitel had been a key factor in getting the effort started and gaining attention for the so-called girl effect — the social and economic benefits a country experiences when girls are better educated.
“She had such a devotion and experiential knowledge of what it meant to invest in adolescent girls and what a powerful agent of change that was,” he said. “We knew that Maria would be a sort of change agent in our world as well.”
Ms. Eitel has written about her philanthropic efforts as a blog writer for The Huffington Post, an online newspaper.
Before joining Nike, she served as European corporate affairs group manager for the Microsoft Corporation and held positions with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and MCI Communications Corporation. From 1989 to 1992, she served in the White House as deputy director of media relations and special assistant to the president for media affairs.
The corporation manages the country’s national-service programs, which are set to grow significantly under the Serve America Act that President Obama plans to sign this afternoon.
“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,” President Obama said in a statement.
