7 Cups Leadership Guidelines

Thank you for being a leader on 7 Cups!

Community leaders are a significant part of our community. In stepping into a leadership role with 7 Cups, you have agreed that you align with our values and wish to uphold our mission. You have the ability to inform and influence our community members. So, it is important to lead by example and be a role model to inspire others to aspire to be someone like you to extend the support to others.

In addition to the community guidelines, rules, and policies currently in place, we are including a list of reminders, as well as one new rule.

➡ As a community leader, you may be provided with confidential information to perform your work on a team or a project. Use this knowledge for its intended purpose only. In other words, please do not abuse your privileges. We trust you to be responsible and maintain confidentiality.

➡. Refrain from engaging in triangulation. This is a very common mistake people make without even realizing it's happening. Triangulation manifests itself in our community as one person who will not communicate directly with another person, and instead use a third person to relay communication to the second, thus forming a triangle. Triangulation is damaging because it interferes with healthy conflict-resolution and lends itself to rumor spreading by taking a private situation between two users and exposing it to more people. Read more about this and take the Triangulation Pledge.

➡. Community leaders must maintain strong boundaries. Being a role model, and a trustworthy and reliable leader, users may become dependent on you. To nurture healthy relationships with the community, it's imperative that you set boundaries for yourself and respect those of others.

➡. Community leaders accept feedback gracefully. Getting feedback can be hard to hear, especially if it's more of a constructive criticism than a praise. Leaders should be able to accept feedback gracefully if given constructively. We all are human and all have things to work on and grow.

➡ Please honor and follow our social media policies (i.e. no off-site contact with community members). 7 Cups is a safe environment for you to build and create connections. We love that you are building supportive relationships with each other and enjoy connecting! In order to preserve this safe space, we ask you not to solicit off-site contact. Also bear in mind, once you take interactions off 7 Cups, we are unable to assist you in the event something happens outside of our site.

➡ Reporting is our responsibility. You are the eyes of our community. We have several ways to report incidents that cover all areas of the site, and we rely on you to direct users to those channels. We also rely on you to use them as well. As the slogan goes: if you see something, say something.

➡ We respect your right to use whatever sites you'd like. However, since we launched, we have discovered that some of our leaders have also been working with non-crisis sites that are similar to 7 Cups. We are all for competition, but we want the intention behind it to be solving broader emotional health challenges. We don't want the competition to be a negative interaction between companies. To protect our community and its ongoing progress, we ask that if you would like to pursue leadership with us that you do not affiliate yourself in leadership positions with non-crisis sites similar to 7 Cups.

(When I say similar sites, I am referring to any site that offers the same services as us. This would not include therapists, AA, NAMI, and assistance programs that share our broad goal to provide support in the healthcare industry but are not set up to operate like we do. They all offer different components that work in tandem with us.)

Leaders: please reply below if you have read and understood these rules!

If you have any questions, you may PM anyone on the community team (@Hope, @ASilentObserver, myself).