May 2023 Community Update!

Dear Community,

I hope you all are well! Things are good here. Big news at home is my oldest kids (twins) are turning 18 next week and soon heading to college. It’ll be a transition for all. Any tips are welcome!

Four quick product updates. One, as mentioned last month, we will be rolling out a new streamlined header for all members soon. We’ve done 3 months of testing and it is clear that it helps people navigate the site much more easily. If you are an older user it might take a little getting used to - like with all changes - please hang in there with us :). We will be releasing a similar header on the listener side as well. Two, a new chat interface will be launched soon as well. You’ll be able to toggle back and forth and get used to it while testing. All feedback so far is that it is a breath of fresh air. Three, we will be making an announcement on Noni - coming soon! - that we are very excited about. I’ll share more in the coming weeks. Last, we will be rolling out a number of new communities to help scale up support across new domains

Thank you!
Glen

H

Hi everybirdy! In our Leadership Spotlight series, we highlighted Mentor Leader Erica and Group Support Ambassador brilliantTurtle89! Please swing by their posts (linked in their usernames) after reading this update to congratulate them. We’re always looking to feature more folks, so if there’s a leader out there you feel deserves recognition, please nominate them via this form!

The biggest development from this month was the closure of our own listener and member report forms to now redirect to the Help Desk. No more Google forms, no more complicated steps, and you can include screenshots with your submissions. We hope this process feels more cohesive and helps improve safety.

Laiba

In academy news, we have continued to focus on strengthening our leadership across programs to offer best possible support to our trainees/interns. This includes a continued focus on consistent onboarding rates and training process. We had 4 new mentors joining our team. We have also been having monthly leadership meetings, this month’s theme was festivals/holidays academy leaders celebrate and what it means to them. It was a great opportunity to learn more about our leaders, you can read the responses here.

In non academy news, we celebrated Eid with the community. You can view the post here. Lastly, we have been noticing all the wonderful work that teens are doing to uplift their community and the care and concern that goes into personal growth and development, so we came up with Teen Awards. It is an opportunity for teens to acknowledge and appreciate fellow teens and adult-teen listeners for working on personal growth or contributing to teen community, you can read more here.

Obs

In Group Support front, we were working on re-introducing Member Discussions 2.0. The ultimate goal is to have a bunch of discussion on each and every topic so we all can be able to support each other and minimize any stigmas related to any challenges and struggles we are going through.

Also, Group Support team announced Mental Health Awareness Event in Group Support Chats. We will post the schedule soon. All are invited and welcomed to attend these events and help us empower each other in healing journey and spread the mental health awareness around us. Click here to read more!

Also, @Lou73, @MagnificientSunrise and team relaunched Teen Sharing Circle Sessions. If you haven’t attened one yet, please do. These sessions are uninterrupted space to share, vent and get support while taking turns to share. And, Lou updated the Sharing Circle Hosting guide to make it simpler and shorter for anyone to check, read and prepare oneself to host a Sharing Circle session to support the community. And, @brilliantturtle89 joined us as Group Support Ambassador to support and guide our Chatroom Moderator Team and additional support in teen community.

In Teen Community news, @Erica and Teen Transitioning Team introduced the initiative to increase guidance and support for our Adult-Teen Listeners. And, on the Verified Listener program front, introduced VL Follow-up initiative.

Overall a lot of progress on various fronts, and I appreciate entire leadership team and community (each one of you) for going above and beyond in your efforts to bring and scale up compassionate support for all. T h a n k Y o u!!

Evelyne

We onboarded a new Ambassador for Care Team @MelodyoftheOcean! She will be helping @Chevy81 as they continue to promote support for listeners and strengthen inclusivity. The AE team has 30 team members and posts an educational post each month. This month's is here. Active Listening Grading Team had 80-94% people pass AL1-AL4 tests in April! They continue to encourage people to take the tests to increase their listening skill awareness. SPOT has scaled up their team and posts the top 5 flaggers every month.

SoulfullyAButterfly

This month, we have been working to add therapeutic content in the forums to help everyone learn more about and practice activities based on evidence-based interventions. These additions with activities to do together, as well as prompts to help explore different topics help us collectively improve our well-being.

These opportunities will be alerted and featured into your feed so you can stay tuned as we explore different topics.

We are now seeking Project Agents to help expand this aim. To learn more about the project and how you can help, click here.

We have also prepared the next season of Huddles, which will launch soon with several topics to get support for!

CheeryMango

For the forum restructuring, we are going to be starting to make changes to the community forums in the coming weeks. Please stay on a lookout in your alerts/notifications for updates.

If you are interested in joining one of the leadership roles in the subcommunities, you can view the masterpost here to see what leadership roles are available for listeners and members.

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

Lastly, if you notice or experience any difficulties while using the forums, please help us to track and report any bugs in this thread. Thank you for your continued support and here’s to what the new month brings.