By Ime Archibong, VP of Product Partnerships

Today, over 400 community leaders gathered at our headquarters in Menlo Park for the Facebook Communities Summit. In front of this audience, we announced a number of product updates to help them continue to build community on Facebook:

• Helping group admins invest, engage, and manage: Group admins invest their time and energy to maintain their communities. To make that easier for them, we’re adding new post formatting tools and ways to manage their group like how to inform a member when they violate a rule, filtering by date range in their admin activity log, and searching through membership requests by name. We’re also launching a pilot program that lets groups and brands collaborate, expanding subscription groups to more partners, and allowing relevant Pages to join their communities.
• Connecting people with mentors: We’re bringing Mentorship to all Facebook Groups where people can benefit from the direct experience and expertise of others by connecting one-on-one. We’ll be rolling this out over the next few months starting with Groups in North and South America.
• Helping people donate to nonprofits on Instagram: Last November, we announced that people raised over $1 billion for nonprofit organizations through Charitable Giving on Facebook. Later this year, Instagram will bring the ability for people to support nonprofits that are important to them through a donation sticker in Instagram Stories.
• Increasing blood donors in the US: Our Blood Donations feature — which enables people to sign up as blood donors and get notified when blood donation centers near them need blood — will be launching in the US in the next few months.
• Simplifying messaging for Page admins: Page admins will now be able to respond to Instagram Direct Messages from their Facebook Page inbox.

Among the attendees, we were inspired by people like Atif and Aziz who founded Tarjimly, a nonprofit that connects refugees and immigrants with one of over 8,000 volunteer translators within 60 seconds using Messenger, whether they’re in a refugee camp or resettling in a new country.

We met Nicole, who with only $0.12 in her pocket, made it her mission to feed her family with more than fast food. Amid their rural food desert, she started Friedrich’s Market to bring her community healthy, accessible produce. She uses her Facebook Page to communicate with her community, and Facebook Events to host free classes to teach young people healthy cooking.

And we learned from Dasha, who recognized a problem while working at a bank: women in her community were struggling with finances more than others. She knew she could use her knowledge to help them, so she started The Broke Black Girl to provide financial literacy and career advancement resources to women. What started as a small Facebook Group of her friends is now over 50,000 people around the world.

Community is the backbone of Facebook. It’s what drives us to improve our products and build new ones. And it’s why we’re so committed to the inspiring leaders who are working every day to bring people together around important issues, shared passions and common causes.