"Strive Towards Leadership & Professional Excellence" : the 7 Cups Academy!

Hello, everyone! The Community Team has been hard at work on something exciting that we're finally ready to give you a sneak peek at!

Drumroll....

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Introducing... The 7 Cups Academy!

The 7 Cups Academy is a tuition-free institution that trains members, listeners, and researchers to develop skills and better care for our community. There are 5 tracks:

- 7 Cups Internship
- Leadership Development Program
- Group Leadership and Dynamics Development
- Content Development and Marketing
- Quality Leadership Program

Trainees can take one or all tracks at no cost. Each track includes academic coursework and a practicum component where the trainee learns by doing.

History

7 Cups was created to scale emotional support via active listening. The first course was the active listening program that included interacting with a chatbot that acts like a distressed student and an oath to treat people with dignity and respect. At present, over 450,000 volunteer listeners in 189 countries have completed this initial program. The training then evolved to include 280 levels that listeners work through as they master skills and build their listener reputation. This includes 66 different courses that listeners can take to better understand life issues, psychological challenges, and ways to help. In parallel, listeners also created training guides to supplement the educational materials on the site.

In 2014, we added the internship program to create a more formalized educational and practicum process where the listener would also learn by doing. A certain amount of listening and course completion was required to complete the internship. In 2020, we implemented the Leadership Development Program to strengthen the overall leadership capacity across the domains that represent the 7 Cups community.

The success of the prior programs and the additional layering of the training + practicum components helped us better understand that the model created via the internship and LDP could be generalized to other areas like quality leadership, group leadership and dynamics, and content development and marketing.

Career Development and Placement

Our goal is to help people across our community thrive. Academy trainees will develop new skills, educational expertise, and real-world experience across domains. We want the Academy to be a safe place where they can grow and master new competencies. Ultimately, we would like us to be able to bridge graduates from the Academy to more comprehensive roles, and occupations, as they establish themselves in their domains.

We're still working out final details before the Academy is ready to be launched in its entirety, but we are looking to get it live next month (January 2021). However, you can look forward to previewing Group Leadership and Dynamics Development when it's unveiled in a post next week, as well as the chance to vote on the Academy's logo!

Meanwhile, please let us know what you think of this so far! Does it sound exciting? Are you interested in enrolling?