Announcing our New Leadership Development Program!

Hi all!

Hope you all are well! I'm writing today with an exciting update. As many of you know, we have long had two tracks of volunteer roles on 7 Cups: listeners and leaders. At present, we have 411,000 volunteer trained listeners and over 1,000 community leaders.

We have spent years building out our listener training program. If you go to our training tab (https://www.7cups.com/listener/training.php), you'll see that we have 66 courses that you can take to strengthen core listener skills as well as learn how to better help people facing specific issues or challenges. These courses are really good too. We just had our Psychological First Aid course audited by a third party and it came off as strong and meeting their requirements. I suspect most of our courses would pass any sort of third-party auditing process.

On that same page, you can click on the blue certification button at the top to look at the more in-depth Active Listening 1-10 certificate programs we provide as well. In addition to these programs, we also provide internship programs for many universities. I'm proud of our curriculum. What I love most about it is that we can provide it at no cost. It is 100% free. I think that is fantastic.

We are now starting the process of building out a leadership training program. We are hoping to train 160 new leaders and many more as new opportunities emerge (check out these slides for a list of roles and opportunities to serve). We are calling it the Leadership Development Program. If you scroll down on that same page, then you'll see a new Header and links to the overview and first few courses in this program. When we started 7 Cups (way back in 2013!) we only had the very first active listener course that you all take. Now we have 66 courses. The same will happen with the leadership domain and then eventually other domains as the needs and training opportunities arise.

I've included more information on the overall program below. Our goal is to recruit more leaders, provide more leadership training for current leaders, and launch new leadership programs to help us better scale up care for our community.

If you are interested in becoming a leader on 7 Cups, then please sign up here.

We will start the first cohort in July (the 7/10 Cohort) and will notify you when we are ready to go. Our goal is to complete one course per month. We encourage everyone interested to apply asap, the deadline for the course is 7/10. The application process will remain open even after however you will join the next cohort (8/1/2020) if you miss the deadline.
Thoughts and feedback welcome!

Glen

Leadership Development Program

The 7 Cups Leadership Development Program is designed to help you become a strong leader. The program takes a personal approach and starts with helping you identify and build upon your natural gifts and strengths. It then transitions to focusing on the core discipline of problem-solving. The next course focuses on specific interpersonal skills needed to be a strong leader on 7 Cups, including mastery of communication skills, time management, conflict resolution, and stress management. The fourth course helps you learn how to build community through group support and sub-community work on 7 Cups. The last course provides an overview of servant leadership and other foundational leadership principles.

The program includes content components (reading, watching videos, and passing quizzes to show mastery of knowledge) and practice components. There is a learning by doing practical component where you practice what you learn by serving in a community domain alongside other leaders in either the engagement or quality programs. The program utilizes a cohort model of learning. You will start the program with a group of leaders and work through the curriculum of 5 courses as a cohort. You will receive a badge for the completion of each course and Leadership Studies Certificate upon completion of the entire program.

Here's where you can read about the courses:

Course 1. Personal Leadership 101: Identify and Build Your Strengths

Course 2. Becoming a 7 Cups Leader: Best Practices

Course 3. Personal Leadership 102: The Problem is the Path

Course 4. Foundational Leadership Principles

Course 5. Community Building Course: Challenge

This post is brought to you by the Leadership Development Program Team, find out more information about the program here.