August 2022 Community Update!

Hello Crew!

I hope you all are well!

I’ve been thinking of this idea that I wanted to share with you all. I’ll make a more comprehensive post soon, but wanted to drop here to get some initial feedback and to ask you all to percolate and maybe experiment with me on it.

Here is the gist of it. Approach as many conversations or relationships as you can with the intention of believing and hoping for the best for the other person. This could be a person you chat with at a store, a family member, a friend, or even a person that you don’t particularly enjoy being around.

It is a pretty simple process. When you start talking with a person, settle in and allow yourself to relax. Don’t make any asks of them. Then, allow yourself to feel/experience/hope for the best for that person. Whatever that person naturally wants or hopes to happen; just allow yourself to go along with that and see what happens.

If you want to join me in this, then try it out for a few weeks. I’ll make a post soon and we can share ideas and iterate on the ideas.

One other quick announcement. We have season 2 of huddles starting up soon. If you like small groups and a tight knit group of people to help you, then I highly recommend them. Connect with @soulfullyabutterfly to learn more.

Thank you!
Glen

Heather (H)

This month I launched a new open chat event led by myself to answer questions about the site with a focus on welcoming and guiding newbies, both members and listeners, and providing live support to the community. Held on both teen and adult side, it received positive reception so if feedback continues to be good I will consider increasing the frequency of them and/or extending the length. Here’s the initial announcement post. I am aiming for the second Thursday of each month, but keep an eye on my space for confirmation.

I’d also like to draw your attention to this month’s spotlighted leaders: jersey123456 LavenderHere and Izzy274. Please give them a moment of your time to reply, and if there’s a leader out there you feel deserves recognition, please fill out this form!

And as always, thank you to everyone who has continued to utilize our official feedback form! We strive to incorporate your feedback, whenever possible, into how we grow to keep building our ideal community. We have gleaned a great deal of helpful insight from your submissions and will continue to implement suggestions that are actionable. Tech items are raised for consideration to our dev team and all domain-related feedback is also relaid to the respective leads. If you have any questions about your feedback, you can always drop me an email at heather.nelson@7cups.com.

Laiba (Hope)

In academy news, we have been focusing on providing more support to our enrolled trainees. The academy team has been working on providing group check-ins for academy trainees which can be attended by graduates and mentors. We trailled the check-ins and decided on these times. These sessions happen weekly on the following days and times.

• 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM ET Wednesday (Adults)

• 11 AM - 12 PM ET Thursday (Adults)

• 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM ET Sunday (Adults)

• 9:30 AM - 10:30 AM ET Thursday (Teens)

• 11 AM - 12 PM ET Wednesday (Teens)

All academy trainees/interns, graduates and mentors are welcome to participate in these check-ins. You can attend them in the academy hub room, available to academy associated users. If you wish to host them, please express interest here. We are very grateful to @GoldenNest2727, @SirenOfSerenity and @yourbuddy30 for leading our very first sessions and making this initiative a possibility.

Additionally, we now have two fresh academy materposts with the latest academy programs information. You can view the post for members here and click here for listener’s post. Credit to @Soulfullyabutterfly for helping shape these posts.

Ending the update with a fun academy fact! The 7 Cups Academy has had 1278 graduates and currently has 404 enrolled trainees/interns.

Obs

In the Group Support news, we were working on a few initiatives and progressed. Teen Take Over, Scheduled Discussions, Teen Positivity Discussions, Introduction of Health Care Workers Support Session are a few to name. All the members who participated in them so far, finding them meaningful and impactful experiences. Check here for what community has to say about these sessions & Sharing Circles. We are working further on scaling it up and diversifying the topics to bring support on all issues.

On the Listener Chatroom front, we are making a lot of progress. Some upcoming ones are introduction of Chat Supporter Refresher Quiz, Checklist for new chatroom leaders, swiftening the applications processing and onboarding. Also, we working on bringing new leaders.

On the Recruitment news, we onboarded 2 new Group Support Mentor Leaders. Both Bunny and Lou are already making some progress on the ideas they started working to improve and strengthen their tracks. On the communication front, we built a Room Supporter / Moderator dashboard for better communication, problem solving, brainstorming and alignment in actions and steps as a team. A big big shout out to all the team members for making it helpful for new leaders.

SoulfullyAButterfly

This month marked the successful completion of our Huddles project! A Huddle is a closed group where the same participants meet up to provide continuous support and social connection to each other over multiple weeks. Huddle sessions are held once a week for 8 weeks in a private group chat with trained facilitators, and Huddlers also have a private forum space to maintain connections in between scheduled meetings. We have successfully completed the Huddle journey with 6 closed groups and are now looking forward to launching Season 2 of Huddles with some better modifications!

At the moment, we have launched the facilitator sign-up phase so that we can start prepping for the next round of Huddles. This also includes the opportunity to host the very first prospective teen Huddle. To consider volunteering to host a Huddle for your idea, click here to sign-up. You can also find the teen Huddle information here if you are an ATL or Teen Listener/Leader.

Our Huddles have helped us experience closer connections amongst community users and we would like to find more ways to maintain that. One new thing which we will roll out starting next month is a monthly community-wide challenge involving a mix of all the great features we have at 7 Cups. Stay tuned for a notification to subscribe to the September challenge with a gratitude theme.

For translation projects, we are focusing on completing the following app projects: Arabic, Chinese, French (general), German, Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. These are all above 90% completed so if you would like to help us get to the finish line please sign up here.

CheeryMango

Our forum restructuring efforts have been ongoing for the past month. The community was updated on the status of the ongoing forum restructuring. You can read it here if you missed it. There will be numerous opportunities for you to share your suggestions and also help with testing out new features in the coming weeks. Please keep an eye out for the information.

All subcommunity leadership applications will be reopened in the next week, once all final changes are completed.

As always, please use this thread to provide any feedback, suggestions on forum functionality (functions, features, utility, any technical aspects only) or bugs that you encounter.

EvelyneRose

We are making great strides in quality assurance. The Anonymous Evaluations Team has reached an impressive 800 evaluations for the month with only 16 teammates. They will be soon partnering with the Verified Listener program to create a robust partnership to bolster quality in our listener community. These plans will be announced soon. Interested in joining? Please contact @FrenchMarbles or @InternalAcceptance for details.

The Care Team and Listener Coaching Team are expanding, and requests are increasing to expand care across the Listener community. Interested in joining? Please contact @Chevy81!

SPOT is restructuring and revamping and is in need of a few people to help out! Interested? Contact @Rebekah or @Midnightraven999.