SEA Names Lisa Nitze President and CEO!

May 25, 2010:  Lisa Nitze has been named President and CEO of the Social Enterprise Alliance, the largest membership organization for social entrepreneurs in North America and the national network linking social enterprises in the U.S. and Canada with peer networks abroad.

Lisa takes over at the Alliance after nearly five years at Ashoka, where she most recently served as Vice President of the Global Engagement Team.  While at Ashoka, Nitze was responsible for securing resources and providing other support and consulting services for leading social entrepreneurs and their enterprises around the globe.  She connected business entrepreneurs, Foundations and corporations with leading social change agents; oversaw development of a global business mentors network; and spearheaded a global partnership between Ashoka and the members of the YPO-WPO Social Enterprise Network.

“It’s an honor to be asked by the Alliance to serve at this exciting moment in its history,” said Nitze.  “Social enterprises are businesses that harness the power of the markets to efficiently and effectively leverage the full set of resources available to meet critical social needs sustainably.  They are rapidly becoming recognized as essential for healthy economies and communities -- and the Alliance has the important mandate to be THE advocacy and support network for this growing economic sector and its members in North America.”

More than 700 people from 31 countries attended the Alliance’s 11^th Social Enterprise Summit in San Francisco April 28-30.  The Summit has become an annual convening opportunity for members of all the key stakeholder groups supporting, benefiting from, creating and scaling social enterprises in North America.

 “Lisa comes to us from Ashoka where she has rapidly become known as one of the leaders of the social enterprise movement worldwide,” said Alliance Board Chair Bill Strathmann, CEO of Network for Good. “She has the fundraising, strategic and operational skills we need to rapidly increase our membership and place us at the forefront of public policy discussions from the White House to statehouses across the nation.”  Nitze will report to a Board of Trustees that includes leading figures in the industry from the United States and Canada and will be supporting and creating chapters in social enterprise “hotspots” across both nations.

Nitze will assume her new position in mid-July and intends “to immediately begin expanding the Alliance’s ongoing dialogue with stakeholder groups in the public, private and nonprofit sectors.  Addressing the major unmet needs of society,” she said, “requires our collective effort, and forging multi-sector partnerships will be one of our priorities.”

Prior to joining Ashoka in 2006, Nitze spent more than a dozen years as a consultant to nonprofits and public-private partnerships and in variety of leadership positions.

In 1998, she created the national public-private partnership “Save Ellis Island!” to restore and re-open America’s primary icon representing the United States as a nation of immigrants.  She brokered partnerships among the states of New York and New Jersey, the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of the Interior, and national ethnic and historic preservation groups to develop a re-use plan for the island and raise the nearly $15 million necessary to stabilize all 30 of its abandoned buildings, while restoring and opening a select few to the public.

Prior to that, from 1995 to 1997, she created and served as Executive Director for Prosperity New Jersey, a statewide public-private partnership for economic development addressing issues of corporate retention, regulatory reform, urban redevelopment, workforce training, tourism and growth in the high-technology sector.

In the early 1990s she created and directed a statewide membership organization to help Maryland companies penetrate foreign markets and attract reverse investment.  As Executive Director of the World Trade Center Baltimore and World Trade Center Institute in Maryland, she developed an array of peer mentoring and education events and services for member corporations.

Nitze began her career as a broadcast journalist in upstate New York.  She serves on the Board of Directors of the American University of Cairo, the College of the Atlantic, and the Committee for Excellence in Corporate Philanthropy.  She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.B.A. from Stanford University and resides in Washington, D.C., with her husband and three sons.

Nitze replaces Jerr Boschee, who, with five others, co-founded the Alliance’s predecessor organization, The National Gathering for Social Entrepreneurs, in 1997.  He has been serving as interim President and CEO since February.