Irene Walker is the founder and director of Meta Elevate. Meta Elevate a program that was created to support the economic success of Black, Latinx and Hispanic communities, small businesses, job seekers, non-profits and students. She says we created this program because we understood how diverse small businesses and creators are impacted by the pandemic.
When they started the program in 2018, they wanted to create and help these businesses and these communities to overcome the challenges they were experiencing and even more so now in this pandemic. Irene says in 2020, we created a goal to reach one million members of the Black community, and one million members of the Latinx and Hispanic community with the community and learning platform to accelerate to amplify brands and to grow your businesses because we don’t want to see any more businesses actually shutter.
Irene says whether you are a small business or you are a job seeker, you want to future-proof your career and one of the ways we do this through job seekers is by offering training for taking digital marketing skills associates certification through Meta. She says what this does is provides you with free training to pass a certain certification, and you can apply to have a scholarship to take the certificate and the assessment and once you have that certificate, it’s like having a degree to show others and you use it to have leverage to find another job. You can put it in your portfolio to share it online and what is does is put you in a certification network with Facebook and 60 other companies who are looking for digital marketing skills and talent to have that as part of their companies too, so it is a great way that we continue to help even job seekers to find jobs in this economy.
Irene says we want to keep up the momentum for small businesses by offering continued programming especially with Black History Month coming up in the month of February. She says we have ways that you can participate in our Instagram shops initiatives and other consumers can find you as well as a cultural relevance guide that was created by our business equity team and that guide will continue to help you to build your business and grow your brands.
For more information go to Facebook.com/MetaElevate
