September 2022 Community Update!

Dear Community,

Hope you all are well! Ian just came through here and it is raining and raining. Now it is just a tropical storm. My kids are happy to have an extra day off from school. We are thinking and sending beams to all the people that experienced loss in Florida.

There are lots of things cooking that you can see below. I’m excited about the forum restructure that is underway. You all have likely noticed the new community home page. We will be dramatically increasing the number of sub-communities soon which will make it much easier to find threads and engage. What this also means is that we’ll have many more threads to share in the feed and in other areas. These new options will allow us to better personalize and make 7 Cups more interesting for members and listeners. Look for more info on this soon!

And the search function also continues to be worked on. We have all contributed and created great information - a very smart collective intelligence brain - in the forums. The challenge is our search is not as good as we want it to be at surfacing information. That will be changed soon. Thank you for your patience on this front.

Best,

Glen

Heather (H)

Happy Fall! It just so happens to be my favorite season. No matter what autumn looks like for you, I think we can all pull wisdom from this quote: “The trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let things go.”

Now, for updates! I am excited to announce the launch of a new initiative (big thanks to @Hope for partnering with me to formalize and launch this) called the Accountability Wellness Challenge.
It's one thing to hold yourself accountable, but we discovered that there's great power and significantly higher success in meeting your goals if you're "sharing your work" so to speak. You're often more inspired to do something when there's someone else pulling for you. This challenge is intended for you to hone in on things you want to improve on, or things you may be neglecting (ex. meds, exercise, etc.) and log your progress. You're not gonna hit your goals every day, and that's natural; it's all the ebb and flow of life. But I strongly encourage you all to take part in this; it's very simple, doesn't take much time and if you stick to it, it will have a big impact!

In this month’s Leadership Spotlight, we highlighted Azuladragon34, Fristo, and InternalAcceptance. Please give them a moment of your time to reply, and if there’s a leader out there you feel deserves recognition, please fill out this form!

And as always, thank you to everyone who has continued to utilize our official feedback form! We strive to incorporate your feedback, whenever possible, into how we grow to keep building our ideal community. We have gleaned a great deal of helpful insight from your submissions and will continue to implement suggestions that are actionable. Tech items are raised for consideration to our dev team and all domain-related feedback is also relaid to the respective leads. If you have any questions about your feedback, you can always drop me an email at heather.nelson@7cups.com.

Laiba (Hope)

In Academy news, there has been a focus on leadership support. Leadership meetings were hosted for 7 Cups Academy leaders to get their input on their experience as academy leaders and how it can be improved on. It was a great opportunity for the academy team to come together and connect with fellow leaders. Additionally, we have a new academy ambassador @Healingfox210 who has joined the ambassador team as an academy ambassador focusing on the Group Leadership and Dynamics Development Program. We look forward to seeing GLDD thrive under his leadership.

Moreover, the academy team has been working on organizing and hosting Academy Fall Events. Academy Fall Events include 5 weeks of fun-filled forums and group activities for our community to participate in. Through the events, users will be able to get a sense of the content of each academy program. We are focusing on one program each week. We hope that through these events our community gets a better understanding of the opportunities available at 7 Cups Academy. If you are interested in helping us host academy events then please express interest here.

Lastly, over the past few weeks, we have added a number of academy group sessions available to academy people (trainees, graduates, mentors). In an effort to provide an updated schedule to our participants, we have created a main academy sessions availability post that will serve as the central post to view available academy sessions that can be attended by academy trainees, interns, graduates, and mentors.

Obs (ASilentObserver)

First of all, I want to express my deepest gratitude to each and everyone who consistently is a firm pillar of compassionate listening and support to each other. Thank you all for making group chats a safe place and home for everyone. Without you, it couldn’t have been possible.

On the Group Support front, we introduced a workshop for group support leaders. It is a Community Mod Team initiative. @ASilentBunny also working on some of the ideas to support the group support team. So, in return, all room supporters and moderators are well equipped to support our community in the member group chats. While @Lou73 working on recruitment and training of hosts to strengthen Sharing Circle further.

On the Listener Group Chats front, we introduced Chat Supporter Refresher Quizzes for Chat Supporters that in return will help all chat supporters to be well-aligned while offering chat support to listeners. On the other hand, the discussion team working on bringing more learning discussions for everyone. And, @amy, our chatroom ambassador working on organizing a Newbie Party for Teen Listeners. Please stay tuned for announcements and updates on them.

In the Leadership news, @bubblegumwings1234 became an Ambassador to oversee Listener Discussions efforts while we onboarded 4 Chatroom Mentors, 2 Chat supporters, and 9 Listener Chatroom supporters. Similarly, on the member group chat front, 12 Room supporters and 5 Chatroom Moderators. Yayy for these leaders who stepped up to offer more support to all in the group chats.

On the Support Sessions & Guided Discussions, we continue to strengthen and scale up the sessions on diversified topics. If you haven’t attended one yet, please keep a tab on Community Calendar and here!

SoulfullyAButterfly

This month, the community participated in our very first community-wide Gratitude Challenge. We explored how community connections and easy prompts and activities can help us practice gratitude on a regular basis to boost well-being. If you are interested in taking the challenge and exploring the attitude of gratitude, you can now start the challenge at your own availability/interest for 4 weeks by following the Gratitude Challenge Growth Path. I am looking forward to hearing your reflections and for the community to explore our next challenge in October. You will also get a chance to submit your own challenge idea and host it once approved - this application process will start next month!

I also had the pleasure of building an MDS Caregiver growth path - this growth path will still be useful if you are a caregiver for other areas not limited to cancer.

In other news, season 2 of Huddles will be launching starting the first few weeks of October - if you are interested in a private group to connect with and explore topics together, please consider applying - we are still open to applications, particularly for the following Huddles: LGBTQ+ Support, Autism Support, Stress Management, Positive Focus, and Social Anxiety Support.

As always, you can also join us in translating 7 Cups to other languages to ensure global mental health support. View open projects needing help here.

EvelyneRose

We’ve had a very busy month focusing on our quality core projects. Safety Patrol Outreach Team is led by @Rebekah and @Midnightraven999 currently revamping and focused on building up the team so we can continue to provide outreach and safety practices to the community. We have added @InternalAcceptance as an Ambassador for the Anonymous Evaluations Team! She has worked hard to help recruit and train teammates that help us with the safety and quality of listeners. The Listener Coaching Team and Care Team are increasing their reach, creating new initiatives for the care of listeners and coaching needs.

CheeryMango

The month of September has been a busy month filled with lots of restructuring and reorganization in the subcommunity domain.

The entire leadership applications (Forum Supporters to Community Mentor Leaders) are being modified to ensure that the application process for sub-community leadership roles to be smoother process.

With the ongoing forum restructuring, we have shared with the community leaders a proposed list of communities that will be under the new structure. Efforts will be made to finalize this list by early next week so we can continue with the final steps of the restructuring process.

If you notice or experience any difficulties while using the forums, please feel free to leave your comments in this thread to help us track them. Thank you for your continuous support and patience as we implement these changes in the subcommunities.