June 2022 Community Update!

Dear Community,

I hope you all are well!

We’ve been making a lot of very good progress on several fronts. The listener feed is now live. I hope you like it. We will continue to strengthen both the member and listener feed so that they become more relevant to your interests. We also announced our experiment with expanding our small group work to huddles. If you are interested in participating, then please sign up here.

I’m also looking forward to celebrating our 9th birthday with you all! A very big shout out to @cheerymango for all of their help in organizing and planning the festivities. I hope to see you in the rooms and in the other activities!

With gratitude,
Glen

Heather (H)

Hello everyone! Finals, graduations and Pride have kept many of us busy! Lots to celebrate, and I hope it’s been a good month for you!

Speaking of graduations – we have a student appreciation event on July 5th in the Special Events chatroom to commemorate all of you academics who have finished your term and/or have graduated! All are welcome! This is part of our new quarterly admin-hosted chatroom event series. There will 4 a year and themed for each season.

Now that we’re entering a new quarter (Q3!), we are opening it up with a community wide survey to assess health, morale and identify improvement opportunities. If you have feedback for us, we’d love to hear from you.

And lastly, our big birthday chatroom event is confirmed! We'll be trying something new in splitting the age groups this year. 12PM for adults, 1PM for teens. RSVP here!

Laiba (Hope)

This past month, the main focus of 7 Cups Academy has been on launching the time management course! It is a practical course aimed to train you on how to best use your time. We have created it in a growth path format with a revision doc followed by a quiz that you can take to ensure you are applying the teachings of the quiz and making the most of the ideas given. Everyone who completes the steps will receive a certificate and a badge. You can find more information here.

Additionally, we decided to have one google classroom per month for each program to allow for the trainees/interns to interact with each other and get support in one place. We have also been creating more fun based posts in academy sub-coms and started experimenting with more forum based games to provide trainees/interns a relaxing environment. Other than that we are working on few mentor focused updates that will roll out soon! So stay tuned for that.

Obs

In the Group Support News, the big update is the new criteria to access group chat rooms will go live soon. A big thanks to our product & tech team to making it happen. With the new criteria, we believe it will become easier than ever to join group chatrooms to seek support and offer support. (Full coverage here!) Also, some more exciting updates and initiatives going to be live soon. Project Huddle is one of them and spearheaded by our Content Head @SoulfullyaButterfly. You can learn more about it under her updates.

Second big update is Quality Team made a huge progress on improving the Active Listening Tests. We were working hard on restructuring and making key changes and it is completed. It is under final review and once that complete, it will be available for the listener community to take them and share their feedback with us. We will post the update post soon.

Another key update is we started Teen Take Over Session that happen in the Support Room 24/7 (Teens) every Monday at 1.00 PM Eastern. In other updates, Community Guidelines 2.0 went live at the start of the month. If you didn’t get chance to check it out yet, please read full coverage here!

SoulfullyAButterfly

This month, we launched the listener dashboard/feed alongside a key update allowing members to select chat topics and add a description for what they want to chat about for listeners to review when picking chats from the General Request queue - read about these updates here.

Another big feature we have been working hard on and will be trialing includes 7 Cups Huddles. Research has shown that closed groups (huddles) where the same members meet over a time period of 8 weeks can prove very therapeutic and beneficial. After recruiting and training facilitators, as well as accepting members, our very first Huddle launched next week on the 5th of July! Nevertheless, you can still sign up to join waitlists for different topics as well as share topic ideas/needs in the linked Huddles thread.

Starting the new quarter, the content domain teams will open up applications as we expand our team.

In the meantime, you can consider helping us translate 7 Cups to other languages - the most recent help wanted post can be found here.

EvelyneRose

We have been working hard on scaling up our Quality efforts! The Anonymous Evaluations Team is scaling leadership with @InternalAcceptance and @FrenchMarbles as our new co-lead and Project Agent. If you are interested in learning more, please click here.

The Care Team is expanding fast with an increase in Guides. They are providing resources and support for listeners across the site. If you’d like to submit a Care Request for someone, please fill out the form! They’d love to help.

The Listener Coaching Team has recently added a new leader @Harsvin! They will be helping with teen listener coaches. If you are interested in getting involved in being on the team or learning from a Mentor, please contact @Chevy81.

CheeryMango

As you may know, we have been slowly restructuring the community forums since 2021 and in 2022 we are in the process of a sitewide forum restructure. We understand that it can be hard to keep track of the ongoing changes that are happening on-site, so we have made all of the information available in one centralized location. You can bookmark this page to stay updated on the forum restructuring process as it occurs.

Forums

1. With the ongoing restructure and updating of the listener and member feeds, we have come across bugs that have resulted in issues with editing and relocating posts. We’ve been actively working on resolving these issues with the help of the tech team. The bugs that were causing delays in editing posts and the inability to relocate posts have been resolved to date. If you are still experiencing issues, please contact me 1-1.

2. Previously, we have asked our forum leaders (Community Mentors/Teen Community Stars, Member Leaders, Global Forum Leaders, and Community Mentor Leaders) to help us track any deletions of posts by emailing forum@7cups.com with screenshots and by submitting the forum moderation form (has now been discontinued). Going forward, we ask that you continue to email forum@7cups.com and now assist us with being transparent to the community about post deletions in this thread.

3. An updated clarification on matters related to Stereotypes and Stigma in the forum guidelines has been posted here.

4. To aid in helping to have all subcommunity-related information in a more centralized location, we have relocated the forum guidelines to the 7cups Leadership subcommunity. As well as some other subcommunity-related information which will be further discussed in a follow-up post.

5. A guide has been created to help the community and leaders better understand the privileges that are associated with each role in the community. The privileges associated with each role are monitored by the subcommunity admin and ambassadors. Please feel free to report any misusage of these mentioned privileges to forum@7cups.com. Screenshots, links, and usernames if applicable will be helpful to include in emails.

6. Posts are being created on how to effectively use the community forums and associated tasks with leadership roles. A how-to on community check-ins and taglists has been created already and more information can be found here.

Note: You can use this thread to provide any feedback, suggestions on forum functionality (functions, features, utility, and technical aspects only), or bugs that you encounter.

Subcommunity Leadership:

1. Training for all leadership roles under the subcommunity domain (Project Agent, Forum Supporters, Community Mentors/Teen Community Stars and Community Mentor Leaders) is now form-based. You can accept to be onboarded and badged within a week’s time upon successful completion of the training.

2. Questions and queries regarding roles and responsibilities can be directed to the appropriate person in this thread. If you do not hear back from any of the listed persons in at least 3 days, please send a follow-up message to them or reach out to me directly.

3. It will now be mandatory for all community leaders to submit a monthly check-in form to help us to track their activity and assist with any coverage needed in their roles and subcommunities. The check-in form will be alerted monthly from the last week of the month and you will be given a week to fill it out. If you are going on a self-care break, please tag me in your farewell thread or reach out 1-1 so you won’t be removed from your role. Failure to complete the check-in form in a timely manner, you will be assumed as inactive in your role(s) and may be removed from the role.

Lastly, we will kicking off our monthly events next week starting with the 7cups 9th Birthday Celebration. We will have daily events and activities for the entire community to participate in starting July 4th and ending on July 8th, 2022. For now, you can submit your accomplishments and achievements to be mentioned by the admin team on July 7th here.