I recently worked with Hemihelp (now part of Contact) to help them train volunteer moderators for their peer support group on Facebook. The group was established in 2007 and became more active in 2011. It has over 5,000 members and over 11,000 interactions each month. It seems to be a strong community with a lot…
I have recently licensed my community moderation training package to Cardiff Women’s Aid. As part of this three-year licence, they received an initial training session and feedback on participants practice activities, bespoke training resources and trainer’s notes, a train the trainer Skype session and a draft moderation handbook for their ongoing use. I have also…
Highly commended I’m really pleased that the films I helped research and develop as part of the Miscarriage Association’s new learning resources for health professionals have just received a ‘Highly Commended’ in the Drama category of the EVCOM awards. These resources have been well received by health professionals too – they were given a 5* review in The…
Learning materials for health professionals I was really chuffed to hear that the Miscarriage Association learning materials for health professionals were given a 5* review in the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ journal The Obstetrician & Gynaecologist (TOG). I did a lot of work on these resources and it’s brilliant to get such positive…
Skimming through the British Medical Journal, I came across a blog called Breaking bad news in maternity care. It’s a lovely piece about the new learning resources I worked on with the Miscarriage Association. I coordinated the development of these resources, working with the National Director of the Miscarriage Association, the Media Trust and lots of…
Last week I ran a session on community moderation for OCDAction. Unlike my session for Leeds Mind (which was for community managers and focused on developing a moderation strategy) this session was for moderators themselves. OCDAction have an established community but they want to expand their moderator team and make sure their current moderation practices are as…
This week I travelled up to Leeds to run a workshop I called ‘An introduction to moderating online communities’. It was attended by three groups associated with Leeds Mind. All of them were thinking about online peer support. Some had a platform built and in testing. Others were still figuring out what, if anything, they…
“I’ll always remember the first time I met a ‘PP lady’. It was a very special day.” “I had lots of friends who were mums but none of them understood what I was going through. I felt weird, lonely and isolated. When I found the forum I was like ‘Oh my god. People understand.” Last Saturday…
Last night I ran an online training session for YouthNet’s chat moderator volunteers (I’ve written a post about what is is like to moderate real time support chat for young people here). We all joined a chat room in YouthNet’s online volunteer community for an evening session. The focus of this chat was talking therapies…
Running a training day for volunteers working on a new online peer support service for APP I was really pleased to be asked to help out with APP’s new online peer support programme. APP has been funded to provide peer support to women with postpartum psychosis and their partners. They have been running an online…
Want to be happier every day? Well who doesn’t? Personally I am interested in exploring ways of helping me manage my wellbeing as I try to cut down on the anti depressants I have been on for the last 12 years (a process that seems to have stalled around the 20mg mark). I’ve also recently…
Do you ever start something new and find yourself thinking ‘I should have been doing this for ages’? I had a very strong case of that this week as I began a new Coursera course called ‘E Learning and Digital Cultures‘ online. Last year I watched a fascinating TED talk by Daphne Koller, one of…
After a recent dinnertime debate was resolved using the internet, a friend of mine said wistfully “Sometimes I just speculate indefinitely for old times’ sake”. I expect that this is a sentiment that we all recognise – the way we approach what we don’t know and the way we develop our knowledge is changing. So…tell…
The essential skills advisors and peer supporters need for giving advice, information or support online These are some of the basic skills that supporters and advisors find useful when working online. The support offered might be one to one (email style), peer or expert support, moderating forums or moderating real time chat. Depending on the…