Facebook will work with two Bay Area community colleges, Cañada College and Foothill Community College, to create a new digital marketing certificate, it said Monday.
The new partnership “allows us to take what we’ve been doing hyper-locally and lets us reach more people in a sustainable way,” Facebook Public Policy Manager Juan Salazar told the Business Journal in an interview on Friday.
“In terms of being able to scale something for this size, we know that doing it through community colleges ends up being one of the most effective ways, given that we’re meeting people where they are and there are folks that are coming from all over the Peninsula,” Salazar said.
The certificates fall under Facebook’s “Community Boost” program, which aims to offer free business training to communities.
Earlier this month, the company said it would bring jobs-training nonprofit Year Up’s training team to its Menlo Park headquarters, guaranteeing internships and potential full-time employment to local young adults who go through that program.
The community college partnership is part of a larger effort for Facebook, which aims to team up with 20 community college partnerships by the end of the year. So far, the company has announced partnerships with seven community colleges: Central New Mexico (Albuquerque), Des Moines Area Community College, City Colleges of Chicago, Eerie Community College (Buffalo), Bunker Hill Community College (Boston), Roxbury Community College (Boston) and Columbus State (Columbus, Ohio).
The latest local partnership also come as Facebook increases investment in local communities as it expands its footprint in the Bay Area. The social network plans to open new campuses in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Fremont and downtown San Francisco in addition to doubling its workforce in Menlo Park to 35,000 in coming years. It has faced some criticism from community members who claim the company’s explosive real estate growth is exacerbating the rise in Bay Area housing prices, including in historically low-income communities like East Palo Alto, which borders its hometown of Menlo Park.
In early August, Facebook said it would train 80 local young adults based in East Palo Alto, Belle Haven and North Fair Oaks through Year Up. It will begin training 40 students this fall for a six-month internship with hopes to train 240 over the next three years.
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