February 2023 Community Update!

Dear Community,

I hope all is well! It is now starting to warm up here. I’m very glad to have the gray days and cold weather beginning to fade.

I wanted to take a minute to highlight a couple of new communities that we’ve rolled out. The first is our Women’s Issues community. Women make up about 65% of our members and men make up 35%. What that means, is that 7 Cups is mostly a female community. What we’ve done with this community is make women’s health more focused. It was already there, but not as pronounced.

The second community is Work and Career. We all, on average, have about 29,000 days in our life. We spend about a third of that time working (and some of us a third sleeping!). Anything that is a third of your life is extraordinarily important! We write about some of this in our culture guide and have a great leadership development program in the Academy. The key is to help you find work that you are a) interested in doing; b) good at; and c) can generate an income. I like to see work in a missional sense - like yes I have this job, but I’m also working towards fulfilling a mission that I think is important.
Big shout out to @soulfullyabutterfly and @cheerymango for all of the hard, smart, and conscientious work here!
Thank you all for being a core part of our community! I appreciate you all!

Best,
Glen

H

Hi everyone! Just a few things from me:

We are making a concerted effort to activate and energize the teen community. I am doing my part with a new event to guide and educate our teen listeners. Every Friday at 2PM ET in the Teen Listeners room, I’ll be hosting an AMA. If you’re a teen listener, this is the place for you to come in, chat and seek help. ATLs are also invited! Please help me spread the word.

When you’re finished reading our update, please hop on over to these posts to learn about and congratulate this month’s featured leaders: Harsvn and CompoundingHappiness

If you’d like to nominate someone for demonstrating great leadership qualities, please fill out this form! Anyone occupying a leadership position is eligible! Laiba Academy team has been focused on leadership, we have several new leaders in trial in various roles that we hope to announce seoon. We hosted leadership meetings which served as a get together and a common ground for mentors/project agents to share their experience as academy leaders. From the feedback provided in the meetings, we created a forum based activity for academy leaders so that leaders across timezones can be connect with each other. We aim to provide more such opportunities where academy leaders can connect with one another and share their experience and support each other. In addition to our leadership focus, we also worked on updating the 7 Cups Internship program. We reduced the required weekly hours, electives and made some changes to the program’s extensions policy with the goal to better set our interns for success. Highlights of the update:

• Listening hours reduced to 3 per week for both tracks

• Electives were reduced to 5 for the community and 8 for students. For student track, we add 1 elective for every two weeks after the 13 weeks. So if you apply for 15 weeks, you will have to complete 9 electives.

• Extensions available with updated conditions

You can find all the updates made here.

Obs

In Group Support front, we opened Depression Support as 24/7 room and 959 users joined to share and get support in February, 2023. We want to ensure everyone have a supportive and compassionate environment to share and open their depression challenges and support each other and walk together in the healing path. I am thankful to everyone for their compassionate and supportive presence in the group chats.

In the Listener Chatroom news, @Jenna worked on strengthening the Peer Support Team. Some of the key updates included revamp of the peer support criteria, peer support discussion leader role update and upcoming peer support discussions.

In the Teen Community news, we focused on teen leadership and 8 teens joined the Group Chat Leadership Team. While on the Adult-Teen Listener front, we updated the ATL Guide to support the teen members. We continue to increase support for our lovely teens. Thank you to all teens and ATLs for their huge support and presence in the community.

Evelyne

We have had a lot of progress in the quality scope. There have been 300+ Active Listening tests graded with high passing rates for the majority of listeners. We are looking into different ways to get this test out to more listeners and spread awareness.

We are currently restructuring our Safety Patrol Outreach Team while we revamp and expand the team organization. We are adding Project Agents and working on recruiting and new outreach ideas.

The Anonymous Evaluations Team is doing well with 385 evaluations so far in February. They are creating monthly posts to discuss listener learning topics of interest. Please read newest here.

The Listener Coaching Team and Care Team are continuing their good work to coach and appreciate listeners. The Care Team is working on some improvements to their processes that will be appearing in the near future.

SoulfullyAButterfly

This month, we launched the Women’s Issues community with a great group support event celebrating its launch. The Women’s Issues community also has hosted its own set of Women’s Issues Huddles, closed groups based on our Huddle model. With a lot of applicants expressing interest, we launched 3 Huddle groups with a mix of members and listeners. The Huddle applications are still open so you can still join wait lists for this topic if it interests you. These Huddle groups include a 6 week guided journey with various prompts throughout the week, alongside opportunities to stay connected with the same peers to develop strong support connections.

In addition, we also launched the new Work & Career community as a space to seek support for work and career challenges including job transitions, work stress, and burnout. This community space also offers the opportunity to start specific career based topics to connect with peers in the same field.

If interested in participating as a leader in any of these areas, you can PM me to know how to get involved.

As the quarter progresses, we are excited to keep supporting the forum restructuring as well as the new community addition process. We will also be launching more Huddle opportunities soon.

Ending the month with an app feature update, the 7 Cups mobile app now hosts mindfulness audios as well as an improved streamlined flow for posting in the forums - read more about this update here.

CheeryMango

In the upcoming weeks, there will be changes to the application and training forms for all leadership roles. We will also be launching monthly and quarterly refresher training for all sub community leaders to stay up to date on the changes that are happening in the community and how it impacts their work. A further update on what changes we will be implementing will be available soon.

Reminders:

1. All forum supporters, community mentor and community mentor leaders are asked to fill out the Subcommunity Leadership Check-In Form for the month of February so we can keep updated on what’s going on in your team and roles and see how we can offer our assistance.

2. If you see anyone violating any of the forum guidelines, please use the flag option 🏴 at the bottom of every post and flag it so the forum flag team can remove it as quickly as possible. Alternatively, you can write to forum@7cups.com with a link to the post and username if necessary.

3. Please note that the 7cups forum account is there to communicate with the community on any post deletions or modifications. If you would like to follow up as to why your post was deleted or if it violated any forum or community guidelines, please write to forum@7cups.com only and not message the account.

Thank you for your continued support and excited for what the new month will bring for us!