June 2020 Community Update!

Hello Community!

The time is flying. Each month we do one of these updates and it feels like the last one was a week ago, but already a month has passed. This is a good indication that our work is interesting, meaningful and fun.

We have been doing a lot of work across a lot of domains, but I want to highlight our main focus in this update and that is on leadership development. We read the book Get Together with the community team and also piloted a community course where we worked through the book together. One learning from that book is that we need to increase the number of leaders across our community. That caused us to look through our different domains and audit where we need more training and more roles.

The result of that is a new leadership development program that we will be launching this week. It consists of 5 new courses and has both content and practica components - meaning that new leaders will learn models and past tests AND also learn by doing through helping to develop and manage programs.

I am excited about this initiative. I think it is going to help us scale up high warmth and high expectations across the community. You can learn more about it here.

H

Translations Project:

With the Translations Project Revival, we have had lots of volunteer translators who have shown great dedication in helping globalize 7 Cups. We are currently standing at around 84,300 available translations for 44 available language projects! This month, we have completed the Chinese Traditional and Portuguese language projects!

We are at our final touches for languages including Chinese Simplified, Spanish, and Hindi. If you would like to help out in polishing these projects before there finalization and launch, please PM @SoulfullyAButterfly - we are looking forward to completing these projects!

Our designated leaders continue to help coordinate the project. We are proud to announce that @IamCecilia stepped up to be the designated leader for the Chinese Simplified project.

Our team members have also shown great support and enthusiasm for the translations project - I would like to show appreciation to members like @TNIKolt who helped finalize the Portuguese language project by ensuring everything is accurate and proofread. To show our appreciation, we are awarding them the Translation Microscope badge.

If you are interested in stepping up to be a designated leader for other language teams, please PM @SoulfullyAButterfly

As we continue to complete other translation projects in the upcoming months, keep an eye out for other celebrations such as Stars of the Week and Translation Masters and Pros celebrations!

To start the next month on this high note, we invite the 7 Cups community to celebrate our completion of the Chinese Traditional and Portuguese projects. We will be holding a community party in the Special Events Room this oncoming week! More details to be announced soon.

Content Volunteer Team:

After the launch of the Content Volunteer Team towards the end of this month, we have had over 150 applicants - it is amazing to see lots of people expressing interest in writing and more importantly, improving the quality of the content at 7 Cups!

Although the team has only just launched, we have been able to improve 34 Question and Answer Pages. We are excited to edit other onsite content alongside publishing new content for our Expert Mental Health News and Advice section.

As we expand our team and goals, we are still open to applications - we regularly onboard new team members according to the open tasks. We are excited to launch other roles as we grow as a team.

For more information and to apply, please click >>HERE<<

Hope/Laiba

Since the last update our teams have been hard at work and I am excited to share what we have been working on!

In sub-community news, the sub-community leadership is doing an incredible job under the leadership of Tazzie (our Sub-community ambassador). We continued to celebrate all important days in June such as world environment day, National safety month, International day of yoga, PTSD awareness month, world music day and of course the Pride month! You can find the masterpost here. Additionally, the team launched Fireside chats, an opportunity for people to come together and discuss what a topic means to them. In an effort to further acknowledge the work of sub-community leaders, each month the community will vote on the list of selected leaders who have worked hard and met their role requirements and the top 3 votes will receive the sub-community rockstar badge. On the leadership front, six new community mentors and one community mentor leader was added to the sub-community leadership Team. Last but not least, two project leads were added to the welcoming team.

On the forum front, our Forum team continues to work together to ensure quality responses to forum posts that need a reply. Additionally the team is working on onboarding more forum leaders to provide added support and moderation coverage. Lastly, in less positive news our beloved forum ambassador @Anomalia stepped down from her role to focus on her offline commitments. We thank her for her continued support and work for our community and especially her dedication to forums. We appreciate her choice to still stay and support the forum track as a forum mentor. You can see her role change post here.

On the teen side, we have been balancing fun and support. We had a party to celebrate all of the contributions of our teen community and we enjoyed a little show and tell. It was heartwarming to see what we hold close to our hearts and to share it with each other. A thank you to @GlenM and @Asilentobserver for coming to the party and making it extra special. Additionally, a new teen project called Ice-cream socials was launched! The goal of this project is to bring the teen community together for a lot of excitement, fun icebreakers, games, trivia and supportive activities in the Teen Only Zone community every Friday! Additionally, @GrahZeymahzin was on boarded as the teen transitioning mentor lead. We are excited for Grah to further improve our support system for aging up teens. In an effort to further encourage a supportive environment that encourages growth and quality listening amongst our teens we have moved our fun events from teen listener room to Friendship room. In the coming month we will work on bringing more listener learning discussions to teen listener room and adding more fun events to the friendship room. Lastly, the teen side continues to do a great job at providing sharing circle coverage and taking the lead on hosting discussions. (Please note that all links in this paragraph can only be accessed by teens)

In Internship news, we continue to see a rise in internship applications. We added 2 new intern mentors and 1 intern teen star to help us support the rise in interns. Since our last update, 124 more interns successfully completed their internship trial and joined us as 7 Cups Interns. Additionally 21 more interns successfully completed their internship and became Intern graduates. We also introduced an internship drop form that allows interns to drop out and provide us with feedback to further improve our project. We are very proud of our interns for consistently putting in the work and improving their listening and professional skills and grateful for our hardworking internship mentor team for supporting our interns.

In other news, Did you know 7 Cups is turning 7 on July 7? Tazzie and Gracey have been working on planning events and celebrations for 7 Cups upcoming birthday! so stay tuned for that!

Obs

I) Group Support

In Group Support news, we announced additional chat room guidelines and measures to ensure a safe and supportive environment for our members. Thank you for continuing to use the support room in a manner so that all can benefit.

We closed CoVID Support Room as it wasnt active. While, we opened a new support room named Current Events Support to provide support to the users affected due to any ongoing issues in their country or world.

Then, we linked Support Room 24/7 and Member Community Room with the Newbie Hub SubCommunity. Some of our wonderful chat room moderators and room supporters reached out and expressed interest to provide support to the room and community moderators.

We posted some tips to engage in the chat rooms and make a difference in the environment. We usually want to bring the change and change the way things happen to make it better and improved. You are a catalyst who can bring change by setting an example on how to get things done. So here are three posts that share some tips to create a supportive and impactful environment in the chat rooms you are participating in:

6 Ways to Make A Change in Group Support Member Chat rooms

5 Ways to Make a Difference in the Listener Chat Rooms

5 Tips to Become a Great Chat Room Leader

What are we working on?

We are working on recruiting Project Agents to help us with general tasks related to Group Support. It will help the Mentor Leaders to provide more and better support to the Group Support Team.

Then, we are brainstorming and discussing to build a centralized discussion system to ensure better scheduling, coverage, and monitoring various support sessions, discussions on various topics happening in the rooms every day. It will allow us to provide better support and appreciate the efforts of the discussion leaders.

We are also working on simplifying the communication system with room supporters and chat room moderators so they get better support and help from leaders and we provide better support and engagement in the community as an aligned team.

II) Quality

In the Quality news, we are working on:

Creating Listener Quizzes. These quizzes will be focused on learning and understanding some of the common protocols in a fun way. Thanks to Mel and Power for thinking, problem solving and helping to create these to better equip listeners community to ensure they provide better and focused support to members and fellow listeners.

Creating a Chat Room Primer that will cover what is and what isnt okay to do in Chatrooms. It will include best practices and chat room rules well explained, report system and actions. It will allow us to help new listeners absorb the important information and settle down in the listener chat rooms.

Bringing some tutorial videos on how to handle normal chats, how to handle troll chats and an overview of 7Cups Listener Dashboard. These will be videos of mock chats by 1 listener pretending to be a member and another listener responding. Eventually, wed like to see a catalog of videos that we can use for training across a number of different topics (depression, anxiety etc.). If interested, please contact @asilentobserver.

Feedback is important for improvement. Without feedback, the communication process is incomplete. But sometimes, it can be hard to accept feedback even when it is helpful and constructive. We drafted a post to help us all learn the difficult discipline of embracing feedback.

"Feedback is a gift. Ideas are the currency of our next success. Let people see you value both feedback and ideas. – Jim Trinka and Les Wallace

III) Community Spotlight Initiative

In the Social Media news, we started Community Spotlight, we started some dedicated activities on social media channels. Under these activities, we focus on appreciating, honoring and featuring our community users for their remarkable contributions in the community.

Also, we are recognizing and appreciating 98 leaders under the June 2020 Community Monthly Spotlight. These leaders are identified as top contributors who went above and beyond in their efforts to support different community projects and programs. And, we appreciate all our community leaders. Because there is a community builder in each one of you.

At last, thank you for being with us. As you all know 7Cups completing 7 years on July 7, 2020. What a remarkable journey so far! I know some of you are ancient (in words of our teenies). But, when we reflect on the last 7 years, it tells us a story of hard work, ups and downs, some great initiatives, some mistakes and failures. But we all learned, progressed and improved as a team. We adapted and moved on and have become stronger through it all. We strived to build a community of dreams. A community which is a home for all. We still have a long journey but we are proud of what we accomplished and created together. That is the beauty! Beauty of your presence and contributions!

Thank you!!