October 2020 Community Update!

Hello Community!

Happy Halloween to all who celebrate! My girls are going to be a vampire bunny, powder puff girl, and nature princess. My son is still deciding. The fall always goes so quickly for me. I feel like I blink and the new year is already here.

In less celebratory news, 7 Cups helps a lot of people, and, as a result, we have some level of insight into how major crises impact our world. We are seeing a spike in covid, more unrest, earthquakes and challenges that are impacting all of us on team humanity. It is a hard time right now for many. The quarantines are especially hard for people that struggle with mental health challenges or families where domestic violence is present. All of these challenges are deeply concerning to us.

2 stats that highlight the levels of distress we see. One, pre-covid, daily messages were around 500k a day; throughout covid they’ve been around 800k a day. Anxiety is typically lower than depression. Since covid, anxiety has been up 7%. All the normal struggles that people face are exacerbated by these challenges.

We are a group of compassionate folks working together to make the world a better place online and offline. The people coming on 7 Cups are likely in more pain than they are letting on. The people around you are likely hurting at a deeper level than might seem obvious as well. Listening and supporting others in your life is pretty important now. A smile, a pat on the back, a few open ended questions - all of these let people know you like them - you care for them - and sometimes that matters a lot - more than we can ever know.

Thinking of you all, sending you beams, let’s keep working together, keep our chins up, and get through these challenges so we can be stronger on the other side.

With gratitude,
Glen

H

Hi everyone! I hope you all are well. It's been 4 months since we have launched our Leadership Development Program. It has been wonderful seeing the passion our users have for leadership. We have learned a lot and we have made a few improvements as we evolved that will make the program easier to follow and more accessible!

One of the biggest changes we have made is turning monthly onboarding into weekly onboarding! This new structure allows students to sign up for the week they want to join the program instead of having to wait from month to month! You can read more about it HERE!

We’re also very excited to announce that at long last the LDP is now its own subcommunity!! This will make a huge impact on engagement and provide us with a stronger framework to continue to build the Leadership Development Track out!

And more treat for listeners enrolled in the program! If you scroll to the bottom of the Training & Certifications page, there’s a section for the LDP courses. Whenever you complete a course and receive the badge, the boxes will automatically turn green! So now you can prove that you have done the work!

If you’d like to apply to take the courses, we are onboarding as soon as next Monday! Here’s the application (please read through it carefully to see what the prerequisites are and what will be expected of you)!

If you would like to join the LDP Track and assist students, check out our Help Wanted post!

SoulfullyAButterfly

Programs Update:

The Translations Team project has now reached 89,105 available translations, with over 500 translators on the team! If you would like to help out with this project, please consider applying through this form

We are now considering external translators to help globalize 7 Cups! Do you know anyone who would like some translation experience as well as who would enjoy helping support and spread our mission? They can join the project by filling up this form.

On the Content Volunteer Team end, we are now looking forward to publishing new articles in the Expert Mental Health News and Advice - a fresh article was added this month!

Would you like to join the Content Team? Please PM @SoulfullyAButterfly

EvelyneRose

Quality Initiatives are full steam ahead! The Anonymous Evaluations Team is recruiting for teammates as it starts its journey as a full-fledged team! If you’d like to join, more details can be found here. There is also an Anonymous Evaluations Feedback Team that coincides with the regular team. The application for that can be found here. Together these teams aim to increase quality across the listener space and provide encouraging and gentle feedback to help listeners grow their skills.

Safety also overlaps with Quality in a lot of ways. I am reinvigorating an old Safety project and starting a new one. Together with @Power, we will be reviving Safety Discussions. These discussions will help educate and enrich the community by providing safety tips, topics, and collaborative discussion openly. The new Safety project will be focused on Safety Workshops rather than just discussions. These are still being designed, but the plan is to have the community prepared and trained for safety situations that may occur.

Laiba

The sub-community and forum team has been working on organizing the forum spaces and providing strong leadership to some forum sections that needed more support. As a result we merged Quarantine support, Loneliness support, Psychotherapy forum categories with relevant sub-communities. We hope that this measure will help provide more support to the forum categories and the leadership teams. Additionally, the Leadership Development programme forum category and the 7 Cups therapy forum category were made into sub-communities. Lastly, as usual there were plenty of events and engaging activities hosted by our sub-communities!

In teen news, we removed the community reference requirement for the adult-teen application to make it more accessible. Additionally, thanks to the efforts of MistyMagic and the teen chat room amb and mentor leaders, we started experimenting with chat support banners in the teen listener room to provide more support to our lovely teens. A big thank you to all of our chat supporters who have been exceptionally supportive of the trial.

In Internship 176 listeners joined the program since the last update, 70 listeners successfully completed their Internship trials and became active listeners and 25 interns graduated from the Internship. Lastly, 62 more listeners received tulips.

Obs

The Group Support Team worked on restructuring the chatroom moderator application review and onboarding process. We relaunched the group support buddy program and rolled out a nomination form for the support team leader. All these changes are made to rebuild and revive the different group support rooms and ensure community members get all the support they deserve while we ensure a 24/7 safe environment to participate. We are actively recruiting room supporters and chat room moderators to help us provide better support coverage. Please check the detailed updates on it here!!

In Sharing Circle News, we added a Sharing Circle Button that redirects you to the Sharing Circle Room in just one click. Also, we introduced mega sharing circle hours for participation and more shares. We are working on creating a Welcoming/Appreciation Team for Sharing Circle to welcome our new members and share what Sharing Circle is as well as appreciate the community members for their participation, support and teamwork. We will keep you posted on its progress!

In the Verified Listener Program, we made changes in the requirements to become Verified Listener.

We are working on some ideas as shared by listeners and members in monthly community meetings. We will keep you posted on the progress of them. Lastly, a big thank you for being helpful. You are all showed great amount of support, cooperation, leadership and teamwork. Each one of you are making a positive impact in making this community better than yesterday.