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[UPDATED] ⏸️ Support Group Break from 16/09 - 06/10 (+ important information!)
JustV
Community Manager Posts: 5,612 Part of The Furniture
EDIT: Our normal schedule now resumes Tuesday 8th October.
Good afternoon adventurers, sorcerers, and non-human magical beings 🧙♂️🦄
Some important news for you below - please read and spread the word if you can!
What The Mix is Doing Right Now
As a lot of you know already, The Mix is currently in the middle of merging with Mental Health Innovations who are the providers of Shout, the crisis messenger service. You may have also seen that we're working on some legal matters around our data, our systems, and our policies (thrilling stuff...)
We're now firing on all cylinders and by the end of the month we should be operating as one charity. That means all staff are focusing on working as hard as possible to make sure that happens smoothly.
There will also be a period of time where our data is being transferred to different systems and the platforms we use internally change. That's only temporary, but it means there will be a window of time during the transition where The Mix can't do everything it usually does day-to-day.
What This Means for Support Groups
One of the things that will pause during that busy transition period is Support Groups. There will be no Support Groups from Monday 16th to Sunday 6th. at least Sunday 29th.
It's also possible that, depending on some technical updates that may need to happen, this break might continue for one additional week (bringing the break up to Sunday 6th).
We don't know exactly how much time we'll need, which is why we can't be more specific in this post. But please know that when we have information you can rely on, we'll share it with you.
Isn't this a bit sudden?
It sure is - no getting around that.
As you guys know, we like to give you more notice than this, and we know you prefer that too. Things accellerated quickly with our merger, and even though it's a little last minute, we wanted to plan to close Support Groups now rather than need to close them later unexpectedly.
As a team, we know that changes to our services impact you and may impact you a lot. If we were able to, we would have preferred to do this differently and give you more notice. I'm sorry we couldn't this time.
Other questions you might have:
--
As always, please feel free to post any questions below. Right now the website isn't updated so it says Support Groups are still running during the break, but we'll fix that soon I promise. 😅
Good afternoon adventurers, sorcerers, and non-human magical beings 🧙♂️🦄
Some important news for you below - please read and spread the word if you can!
What The Mix is Doing Right Now
As a lot of you know already, The Mix is currently in the middle of merging with Mental Health Innovations who are the providers of Shout, the crisis messenger service. You may have also seen that we're working on some legal matters around our data, our systems, and our policies (thrilling stuff...)
We're now firing on all cylinders and by the end of the month we should be operating as one charity. That means all staff are focusing on working as hard as possible to make sure that happens smoothly.
There will also be a period of time where our data is being transferred to different systems and the platforms we use internally change. That's only temporary, but it means there will be a window of time during the transition where The Mix can't do everything it usually does day-to-day.
What This Means for Support Groups
One of the things that will pause during that busy transition period is Support Groups. There will be no Support Groups from Monday 16th to Sunday 6th. at least Sunday 29th.
It's also possible that, depending on some technical updates that may need to happen, this break might continue for one additional week (bringing the break up to Sunday 6th).
We don't know exactly how much time we'll need, which is why we can't be more specific in this post. But please know that when we have information you can rely on, we'll share it with you.
Isn't this a bit sudden?
It sure is - no getting around that.
As you guys know, we like to give you more notice than this, and we know you prefer that too. Things accellerated quickly with our merger, and even though it's a little last minute, we wanted to plan to close Support Groups now rather than need to close them later unexpectedly.
As a team, we know that changes to our services impact you and may impact you a lot. If we were able to, we would have preferred to do this differently and give you more notice. I'm sorry we couldn't this time.
Other questions you might have:
- Are the boards open as usual? Yep!
- Is this definitely temporary? Yep!
- Will the Friday chat threads still be running? Yep!
- Will there be a quiz? Possibly, but if so it will be here on the boards (to be decided)
--
As always, please feel free to post any questions below. Right now the website isn't updated so it says Support Groups are still running during the break, but we'll fix that soon I promise. 😅
All behaviour is a need trying to be met.
The truth resists simplicity.
Post edited by JustV on
1
Comments
I'll delete it, I've no idea what I was thinking tbh.
What does it mean for chat breaks later in the year/into next year? Is it worth maybe thinking about having a shorter one in January as we have had a lot of breaks this year and this could potentially be a 3 week one?
Edit: sorry for the late edit, but should this be pinned? I didn’t see it as was really far down until i scrolled down whats new.
We can't say for sure right now. A lot of the work we're doing is back-end techy stuff, but if there are any front-end changes, we'll make sure you all have time to test them with us.
Great point. We know this has been a big year for breaks and this one in particular is longer, unexpected and at an unusual time, and that might influence next year's break schedule.
That being said, the usual breaks serve a few different purposes, like giving our volunteers some time off, giving staff some planning time, etc. Those things will remain important even though we've been heavier on the breaks this year, so it might be that we keep our usual routine.
I know that's a bit non-committal - we don't know for sure yet really, but we'll be weighing both sides of that once we start planning ahead for next year's schedule.
Yes, thank you! Pinned.
That makes sense, and especially time off for the mods is really important especially around christmas. It’s just something worth thinking about as I seem to remember we have had 3 breaks (not including this one) in the past few months and I know people struggle with them.
but if youre becoming one charity, and SHOUT is a crisis charity does this mean youre gonna allow crisis posting? (i dont want to crisis post and i am not in crisis but im just worried about others beggining too because if youre merging with a crisis charity surely thatll make you guys part of a crisis charity too)
This is a really great question @Chloe234 and something we’ve been talking through as a team as you’re right, it could be confusing with Shout being well known for offering crisis support.
To help offer some reassurance, our community guidelines around crisis posting will stay the same. One of the reasons why we have this guideline is because using community spaces like ours in crisis is unsafe and we’re also not trained to help people who may need urgent help. Shout is a 1-1 service with volunteers trained to offer crisis support and it’s much safer to have those conversations where someone is replying quickly to help someone get the support they need to stay safe.
We could see an increase in crisis posting so we’ll make sure to take a look at our website, community guidelines and urgent help pages on the discussion boards to make that as clear as possible. If anyone has any ideas on improvements we could do around this, please do let us know.
You are more than welcome to get in touch with us privately if you prefer to share any feelings you’re having around this update. We’re here to listen
You're not wrong here @independent_ - we've had more breaks than usual, quite close together, and Support Groups have had more downtime than you guys want and expect. We don't take that suspension of support lightly and we know it has an impact on everyone.
That will feed into our planning, but to be realistic with you, I have a feeling that our routine scheduling needs will force us to still take those breaks. At least the closest ones.
Either way it's tricky to say anything at this point, but the mod team agrees with you that it would be good for us to balance that out in the future if we have the resources to.
It does look likely we'll need the extra week to implement those technical updates, and to test the new version of our chat platform with you guys before running sessions again.
We'll confirm this as soon as we can but we're pretty sure that's the plan.
BUT, I'm 90% sure we'll be running some sessions next week to test everything works and let you all use the platform again before we return to normal scheduling. They'll be a bit like a GC and are likely to run earlier than our usual sessions (somewhere between 6-8pm).
We'll share more info about this in a separate thread when we've confirmed plans.
I will say that nothing huge is changing for you guys - we'll just have a slightly more advanced version of the support group platform we were using before, but it should look the same.
Is chat still returning Tuesday or is there gonna be another extension to the break? Just thought we'd hear something else or get another update as its almost the weekend
We've made a new thread here which we'll update tomorrow afternoon with all the details everyone needs to know. I've just seen your question on this thread which I'll get back to now.