David Bridges
Meta has opened up applications for the third iteration of its Community Accelerator Program, which provides training, advice and monetary support for community leaders to help them maximize their use of Facebook’s tools to facilitate growth.
As explained by Meta:
“Throughout the four-month program, selected participants will receive training from experts and coaches through a customized curriculum to help them organize and strengthen their community while connecting with community leaders from around the globe. Participants will also gain access to Meta tools and services to support them in their efforts to activate their members.”
In addition to this, Meta’s also giving participants grants of up to $40k to fund their work in advancing towards community goals.
Meta launched the first phase of its Community Accelerator program back in 2020, as part of a broader push to maximize groups usage, and get more people involved in what it calls ‘very meaningful’ groups.
As explained by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (in 2017):
“We recently found that more than 100 million people on Facebook are members of what we call ‘very meaningful’ groups. These are groups that, upon joining, quickly become the most important part of our social network experience and an important part of our physical support structure. For example, many new parents tell us that joining a parenting group after having a child fits this purpose.
Two years later, Meta revised that number up to 400 million people who were members of these more engaged, more socially valuable groups, and its aim with programs like its Community Accelerator initiative is to refine and improve the groups experience, in order to enhance these particularly valuable communities, and ‘strengthen our social fabric’ more broadly via The Social Network.
Providing more training and resources can help to build groups into a more valuable tool in this respect, and the initiative is now open to applicants from 29 countries, who are prominent members of Facebook Groups that have over 5,000 members.
“The program will be conducted in Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Colombia, Chile, Peru, Mexico & Argentina), German (Germany, Switzerland & Austria), Arabic (Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan and United Arab Emirates) and English for all other markets.”
It could be a good way to help amplify community programs – and no matter how you might feel about Facebook the platform, or Meta the company, it’s impossible to deny the impact that it can have in this respect.
If you’re interested, you can learn more about the Community Accelerator Program here, while you can also apply via this form.
Maya Kensington
Mason Thompson
