February 2020 Community Update!

Hello Community!

I hope you all are well! February is a short month, but it still feels like it flew by at a faster clip than expected. March is almost here!

We have all been working hard and you can see the updates below. I wanted to zoom back and share one thing that Im particularly proud of us for accomplishing.

When we launched 7 Cups in 2013 we did not know how to build a community. We had ideas from different experiences we had, but no real firm plan. It was just listeners supporting members to start. Then we realized it would be good to have a listener support room to provide real time support to listeners. This was the very beginning of our community. Listeners looking out for one another. Then, we realized we needed a central place to share ideas and learn together and that was when we launched the forum. We eventually opened up group rooms and member forums as well and those core elements became the central part of our community.

You can tell from my description that we didnt start with a plan as to how we should build a community. Instead, we took things one step at a time and solved the next biggest problem in front of us. In that process, our community emerged and became stronger.

A little over a month ago we discovered this book called Get Together, which provides a guide on how to build a community. It was fascinating to read. Here is a quick analogy. When you are building a house you have a blueprint. It tells you where to put in the supporting beams, how big the rooms should be, where the bathroom is located etc. It is a detailed plan for how to build the house. Get Together is a blueprint for how to build a community. We did remarkably well in building our community house, but now we can look at our house and compare it with an expert blueprint to see where we have gaps and where we can strengthen things. We can add more support beams in certain places, we can put in windows to take advantage of the afternoon sun, and we can widen hallways so people can access rooms more readily.

Overall, we have to take a collective bow for how far weve come without a guide. It is a testament to our #grit and our collective intelligence. This guide will help us further strengthen things. This guide will help us strengthen our foundations so we can build a bigger house that can support more people. One immediate insight that has come from this book is the emphasis on doing daily or weekly activities together on a regular basis. Heather has posted here on the topic. There are a handful of other simple, but powerful ideas that have emerged from this work that we will share more on in the near future.

Lastly, I want to give a very big shout out to our Ambassadors! Theyve been working behind the scenes moving the needle in big ways to help our community. Their work is mostly not visible to others. Ive asked them to start highlighting their work more now, because I want you all to see how much they care for us. When we can see that people care for us, it gives us courage and strength to keep driving forward. They believe in us and that matters a lot to me. Thank you, Ambassadors!

Updates from H!

Howdy!

Firstly, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts in our Community Feedback survey. I am still sifting through responses and taking notes, but one thing is really standing out, and that is how deeply you care about your community. The sense of togetherness is truly palpable, and you should all feel very proud of yourselves, for everything you here makes a difference. Thank you for all the information you have provided. It will greatly aid our efforts to strengthen our platform.

And this leads to the next item! To improve participation and bring more people together across areas (subcoms, group support, etc), I am asking for your creative ideas in the spirit of community collaboration. Take a moment to read the post and offer your suggestions, if you have any!

What else is new? Oh, the Translations Project is officially active again! This is an extremely important project, and we could really use the help of dedicated volunteers. If you can dedicate time to it, check out the post!

Lastly, we launched a new forum category: Quarantine Support (CoronaVirus / CoVID19). Dr. Adama from Wuhan, China reached out and asked us to help. She was a listener at one point several years ago. She leads a team of people called the Wuhan Warriors. Our goal with this initiative is to support people in quarantine because being isolated can be a very challenging experience.

Updates from Obs!

Alright, lets do a quick recap of what we worked on together!!

We continued to share weekly group support updates as per our discussions in January 2020. I am grateful for your thoughts and encouraging me to do it. If in case you missed them, here are they for a quick review -

Week of Feb 03

Week of Feb 10

Week of Feb 17

Week of Feb 24

We made the badgelock requirements simpler than ever to join group support rooms. We removed the Member Oath badge from the badge requirements. If you are unable to access the rooms yet, please check this post to see the requirements.

We updated the chatroom participation guidelines. It is now more clearer, simpler and well-formatted.

Then, updated the broken links of different forms, made slight changes as per the suggestions we received.

We started Get to Know You Daily Sessions. These sessions are meant to connect and interact to get to know each other and provide better support. It happens every Tuesday to Saturday at 12 pm ET in ASilentObservers Office for both adults and teens. On Sunday 12 pm ET, we have our weekly community chat to problem solve and address the group support issues in ASilentObservers Office. Please come and join us.

Updates from Laiba

The sub-community leadership team relaunched the community mentor track. The role of a community mentor is to keep the sub-community engaged and to ensure support within the sub-community. The first batch of community mentors is already trained and announced. We are excited to see the impact of this role. Depression support and LGBTQ+ sub-communities oboarded new community mentor leaders. Sub-communities now upload their events to tockify, so you can now see what events are happening in sub-communities on our community calendar.

Forums had a major update. The forum ambassadors worked together with admins to improve our forum moderation system. Now all users with forum moderation acces can categorize posts according to what the violation is. It is a step towards safer and more supportive forums. Additionally, the forum team has been working on reducing the forum spam by being diligent in their efforts of spotting and removing spam. We intend to continue with our plans to improve on the safety and quality of our forums.

Teen Leadership Team has been working closely with our sub-community ambassador (Tazzie) to provide a caring and supportive environment for the teens. Teens are helping out by creating supportive posts, some fun events and ice-breakers to provide content for all teen members and listeners. We have also been posting the teen discussion schedule each week to let teens know what discussions they can attend. We rolled out a form where listeners can submit their discussions for the coming week, which are added to the weekly schedule. The teen community is coming together to improve teen activity and engagement in both forums and chat rooms. Last but not least, we launched aging up support systems for both members and listeners. Our goal is to provide transitioning teens with the support they so deserve! (please note the links in this paragraph are teens only)

On the Internship Project front, 36 interns successfully completed their internship trial and joined us as active interns, 13 more Interns successfully completed their Internships and are now intern graduates (since the last update 28 Jan). Four new internship mentors (listener only link) joined the internship leadership team. The Internship Sub-community onboarded three new team members to support our interns participating in the Internship sub-community.

Thank you all for all that you do in our community!