Nike Donating Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) During Global Pandemic Crisis

By Anushka Pawashe

In April, Nike announced they will start manufacturing personal protective equipment (PPE) and donating the supplies to health care professionals at the Oregon Health and Science University OHSU. This means they will be converting their current merchandise assembly lines over to producing PPEs. Nike is one of the few companies financially equipped enough to respond to the coronavirus crisis. Nike is demonstrating corporate social responsibility by giving back during a time in need and not a lot of businesses can afford to do the same.

Nike has released an update; as of early May, Nike donated 130,000 pieces of protective equipment to over 20 hospitals across the United States. The success of this initiative has encouraged Nike to take further steps in helping the health care workers of today. Nike announced it will be partnering with the non-profit organization Good360 to donate over 32,000 pairs of shoes specially designed for healthcare workers. The Air Zoom Pulse is just part of Nike’s introduction of the “Healthcare Athlete.” Nike further discusses the project in a Nike News article. “From the beginning, we framed it up very much like an athlete project. The athlete is the healthcare worker—let’s reorient ourselves completely around that,” says Michael Donaghu, vice president of Nike Innovation.

All businesses are now realizing the importance of having a backup plan, Nike just has the benefit of already having extra funds for a crisis like this. Nike is making social responsibility a part of their core business model while venturing into producing medical equipment for emergencies. Going into it, Nike lacked the expertise and experience to be involved in a project like this. The company took the initiative of communicating with workers at the OHSU and partnering with non-profit organizations to successfully pull this off in a high impact crisis.