April 2024 Community Update!

Dear Community,

I hope you all are well! The leaves are coming back on the trees here and we had our first day in the 80s yesterday. It felt a little bit like summer.

I wanted to take a minute and thank all of the people that run the different campaigns on 7 Cups, lead group discussions, and ask and answer weekly forum posts. I demo the site a lot for different groups. These campaigns are like a thread that one can follow across the site. You can go from one group to the next, or from one community to another, and see how all of the different threads are woven together. It is beautiful to see.

We have also been hard at work on creating a new home page. It has been a long time since we’ve updated our “front porch” (hat tip @belovedme). Part of this is because we invest most of our resources updating what happens across the platform. And a big thank you to all of you that help us iterate on changes to make the core platform stronger. We are now finally ready to update the external facing parts of the site. You can see a little glimpse below.

The new home page, and also the new onboarding I talked about in the last update, will help new users better understand what we are all about. I’m looking forward to sharing it with you all hopefully later this month or early next.

H

Happy April, and hello to a new fruitful quarter!

In this month’s Leadership Spotlight, we feature one of our longest-standing contributors, @Jenna. Jenna is one of our leaders at the heart of LSR, and she’s also well known for being the head of the Peer Support Pogram. Their congratulatory post is here.

We started the LS Program back in September of 2021 and we’re still going strong, thanks to you all for recognizing and building one another up. Check out who we’ve highlighted so far and consider nominating someone!

We continue to work hard to coordinate activities across the community and bring attention to all the exciting things we’ve got going on through the maintenance of our Events Calendar. If you'd like to submit an event, you can do so here.

Note that regularly scheduled group/chatroom events can be found on the on-site Community Calendar

And one last thing for the teens: we have launched a weekly Safety Tips series just for you. Please subscribe to the Safety and Knowledge community to catch notifications for these. We are accepting tips that we can feature in upcoming posts! Let’s spread awareness and help each other stay safe, both on Cups and across the internet.

ATls are strongly encouraged to participate. Teenies look up to you and you can make a big difference!

Laiba

Hi everyone! March has been an eventful month. I have summarized the key events below. 

7 Cups Academy 

• Introduced an AI policy to ensure the trainees can continue to benefit from academy courses/programs and have clear guidelines on the boundaries placed on AI use. You can read post here. 

• On Internship front, we removed the weekly forum progress report requirement and instead introduced an optional check-in thread. Listeners can view that post here.  

• We launched our awaited Group Dynamics course which is an updated and more flexible version of the discontinued Group Support Program. More info on the course here. 

Community Initiatives

• The teen-exclusive Small Steps Challenge came to an end with 11 teens qualifying for the wellness certification. A total of 16 teens participated earning a total of 2341 stars. More on that here. 

• Additionally, spark of the week was launched where teens can submit positive quotes and reflections, the best of which are picked and shared with our community. You can view the first post here.

• I also started a Weekly Quotes Chain! Theme: Discipline and Accountability for people who prefer quotes and thoughts surrounding those themes.

• Our Building Self-esteem series came to an end. You can view the last post and how you can participate here. Stay tuned for the launch of a new series soon. 

Obs

This month, Group Support organized Self-harm Awareness Month, and thank you all for joining and participating in the forum and group chat discussions to support and empower each other. That was uplifting and encouraging for all. Also, we organized a Verified Listener Campaign to discuss and talk about our listening journey and route to becoming a Verified Listener. If you are not a Verified Listener yet, learn how to here! 

In the Listener Chatroom news, thank you to @hopedreamlove for leading the leadership meeting. We discussed some important points to make listener group chats more effective and received suggestions to support our leadership team better. Based on the feedback, we are working on reviving the Leadership Buddy Process to support our new leaders. Also, working on a simple and group effort idea to make our listener group chats active and lively.  And, thank you to @JustSophia for helping us update the Chat support FAQs document with more information and resources. 

Similarly, in the Group chats, we are working on reviving pop-up discussions and will be rolling out the pop-up discussions 3.0 in the upcoming days. Please stay tuned for all updates. 

In the weekly prompts in the forums front, thank you to all participants for your participation and support. Due to your ongoing support and empowerment, in these dedicated communities, we were able to bring more support and comfort to many members. Also, in the periodic feedback, the Weekly Prompts received an average of 9/10 rating. Thank you to all who shared their feedback and suggestions. 

Thank you to everyone for your continued support, compassion, and empowerment in the group chats, forums, and to me. 

SoulfullyAButterfly

This month we opened up a new group chat for the adult side called “Daily Reflections”. During the month of March, the first monthly theme for this new chat space was “Celebrating Growth and Change”. With weekly themes including cultivating a growth mindset, building resilience as well as celebrating achievements and setting new intentions, the group chat hosted daily prompts for users to explore alongside the community. We have enjoyed seeing the deep reflections and shares in this space and hope that it will add another layer of support to our community.

If you missed out on the Daily Reflections during March, you can find the prompts listed here.

This new chat will host a new theme for April, to be announced soon. If interested in helping out with leading reflections in this space, please PM me.

In other news, our long-ongoing global research opportunity with IPU based on Systemic Psychotherapy will be closing its data collection phase by March 31st. Thank you to all our listeners and members who have joined the research throughout the past several months.

We have one open research opportunity for listeners which is based on Simulation-Based Training of Active Listening Skills, being researched by a team from Stanford University. To read more on how you can help their next round of research, click here.

Evelyne

We are currently looking for new quality project agents to help us continue our goal to have quality across the board! Please reach out to me if you’d be interested in helping out with team leadership tasks for quality teams. If you’re new and need a listener coach to help you with listening skills, please reach out to @kindheartedlily. @AnnaSilverberg is my new Quality Assistant and is working on new listener initiatives to help with questions and their journey. 

CheeryMango

Join us here in congratulating our recently onboarded leaders for March. 

We are currently looking for new additions to join our Communities Leadership Team as Project Agents. There are currently four focuses available for you to choose from: Events, Engagement, Community Building and Leadership. The application form and full details of what we are looking for can be found here. 

A friendly reminder for all forum supporters, community mentors and community mentor leaders are asked to fill out the Subcommunity Leadership Check-In Form for the month of March so we can keep updated on what’s going on in your team and roles and see how we can offer our assistance. 

Lastly, if you notice or experience any difficulties while using the forums, please help us to track and report any bugs in this thread. A gentle reminder when reporting bugs or issues, please give as much detail like time and location as to where it was experienced and include screenshots or any error codes so we can properly investigate it. Thank you for your continued support and here’s to what the new month brings.