October 2021 Community Update!

Dear Community!

I hope you all are well! It is the fall here and things are getting down to the 30s in the morning. I actually had to turn my heat on the other day. The fall always goes by so quickly for me. Halloween > Thanksgiving (here in the US) > Holidays > blink and the New Year is here!

We’ve been heads down on a number of exciting projects that I’ve shared with you recently. I’ll talk here a little about how they are linked together.

First, we have the H Prize that will launch in early November. I’m really excited about this initiative. We will likely end up with 100s of growth paths and 1000s of growth path steps that will address a 100s of different issues and challenges we all face. The paths and steps will help us learn how to better help people. It will also bring more helpers - experts and non-experts - to 7 Cups. It has a lot of potential. We’ll learn a lot along the way. I’d encourage you all to participate! @soulfullyabutterfly is an absolute pro at these paths so please message her with any questions.

Second, we’ve been working on the new dashboard. Here is the original post. There was quite a bit of feedback from leaders, listeners, and members. We cataloged it all and are now working on the updated design that you can find here. The center part is the feed. It consists of featured posts and growth path steps. The goal is to personalize the feed so that it is an easy way for people to view information that helps them overcome the specific challenge they are facing. You can see why the H prize will help. We will have a lot more free, quality, content that addresses hundreds of more challenge areas.

Third, is our increasing focus on research. @Hope has been super helpful in coordinating all of our research efforts over the last year. And a big thank you to all of you that have participated and helped out. These efforts are now accelerating, which is good news. Our goal is to strengthen the bridge between universities and 7 Cups so we can further scale up our innovation efforts. The H prize is one part of that and we have other initiatives we are working on as well. I’ll share more soon.

Fourth, and last, we’ve also been thinking long and hard about an increased focus on active listening - what we are tentatively calling a “return to listening.” This is not my term, but I love it and I’m still trying to figure out who came up with it. I’ve been picking up more chats lately and prioritizing active listening. It is easy to get lost in admin tasks and leadership items. Listening keeps me - keeps us - grounded and on mission. We are here to care for one another. That is why 7 Cups exists. Stay tuned for more on this as well.

Heather

October is my favorite month, and I hope it’s been kind to you! Whatever you do this Halloweekend, please be safe out there!

Our Leadership Spotlight Campaign is in full swing. We announced TWO Featured Leaders: RebekahRoyal (Quality Amb!) and calmingmermaid5761 (our first teen leader!). Please take a second to go give them some love!

The goal of this recognition initiative is to highlight every high level leader so we encourage you to nominate someone you think is doing great work! Here’s the form!

We could also use some leadership help with picking up and evolving the Listener Spotlight! If you enjoy making graphics and doing recognition work, please drop me a PM!

Laiba

In the past month we have been focussing on strengthening our academy leadership team. We are trialling three academy mentor leaders and many mentors! If you are interested in being an academy mentor you can apply here! Our aim is to provide trainees with added support. Additionally, it's mostly been business as usual, with onboarding, supporting and graduating trainees. On the academy sub-communities front, weekly academy fun posts continue to provide academy trainees an outlet to engage in fun and take a break. We are also looking for forum supporters to support our academy sub-coms. Moreover @ouiCherie and @anotherfrenchtoastclub organized academy events for world mental health day. We continue to provide letter of recommendations and LinkedIn verifications and recommendations to our academy graduates on request.

Lastly, we now have a trainee badge that will be assigned to all academy trainees along with the existing specific trainee badges and Alumni badge. If you are an existing trainee who does not have the trainee badge or an Academy Alumni who does not have the Alumni badge then please submit this form.

Obs

We successfully completed the first month of the Steps Challenge under the 7Cups Wellness Initiative. All the participants enjoyed it and averaged 9/10 and we took 270K+ steps together as a community. All are invited to join the challenge for the second month which will begin from Nov 1, 2021.

In the Group Support News, we made some tweaks to the Moderator Request Form to make it simpler and easier to fill. We also renamed it as Moderator Request form to bring more clarity to its purpose. Also, we updated the Room Supporter Guide to make it more comprehensive and informative, and introduced the Room Supporter Request Form & Room Supporter Buddy Program. as well. Apart from it, we started Weekly Check- Ins here to hear your experiences in the chatrooms as a leader, listener or member.

In the leadership news, @amy joined as Chatroom Ambassador, @Fristo joined as Mentor Leader - Community Projects, @Bubblegumwings1234 & @SweetDreamer69 as Mentor Leaders for Verified Listener Program and @PuzichkinCat as Mentor Leader for Group Support. All the new leaders are focusing to strengthen and support the community through their efforts in their respective projects.

SoulfullyAButterfly

We have a few new initiatives under the Content umbrella - these include the Growth Path Team which you can consider joining to support the growth paths feature while also appreciating and helping test different growth paths, which is very exciting in light of the H Prize! @Fristo has done a great job in helping organize and execute these ideas.

In addition, we have launched the #ChatWith7Cups initiative through which we plan to host our very first Twitter chat starting November 1 - for details of this event please click here.

Starting November, the Content Volunteer Team will be open to joining without any limits to how many people can help with any of the roles so you are all welcome to apply if you would like to join our growing team as a writer or editorial assistant.

Our Lightship Team on social media is working on being more active and under the leadership of @DreamTouch and @ouiCherie we have a growing team of 15 Lightshippers and 3 Lightship Assistants helping us achieve more growth by outreach and positive posts on social media to drive mental health awareness and support.

Our Translation Projects are another opportunity for those who are interested in translating both the 7 Cups website and/or the app: we are looking for translators for the Hindi, French, Arabic and Malay languages amongst others. If you are able to commit some time to helping complete these projects, please apply after reading the Help Wanted listing post here

EvelyneRose

We are currently ramping up quality initiatives and working on assessing their impacts. There are also some guides being created to spread awareness about the reviews process. We also hope to celebrate our amazing listeners and focus on providing training opportunities throughout the next few months!

In leadership news, the Care Team has a new co-lead! Congratulations to @courageousheart96!