Zuckerberg nears end of US tour, wants to boost small business

NEW YORK — What’s Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest takeaway as he wraps up a year of travel to dozens of U.S. states? The importance of local communities.

“Most of the discussion we have nationally is about what the government should do, or to some degree what families should do,” the Facebook CEO said in an interview. “People don’t spend that much time talking about community, and I think probably that’s the most important part of people’s support structure.”

To this end, Zuckerberg is announcing a program to boost small businesses and bolster individual technical skills both on and off Facebook.

The move shows how intertwined Jeff Roberson / AP

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg meets with a group of entrepreneurs and innovators during a roundtable discussion at Cortex Innovation Community technology hub in St. Louis. Zuckerberg was in St. Louis to announce a program to boost small businesses and bolster individual technical skills. 6 million of them advertise.

“If this were purely about our ad business or something like that, I probably wouldn’t be the primary person talking about it,” Zuckerberg said. “But because we are kicking off this whole program that I think is going to be critical to the whole mission focusing on building community, I thought it was an important thing to do.”

Facebook wouldn’t say how many of its own employees will be participating in the Community Boost program, which will “visit” 30 U.S. cities next year and offer people free training on a range of digital skills.

Those will include coding, building websites and — naturally — using Facebook for their business.