Service Without Self-Esteem in AA Sobriety – Frank M.

We ask for a moment of silence and gratitude for the AA recoveries of the past 45 years. Will you please join me in the serenity prayer? God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change courage to change the things i can and the wisdom to know the difference my name is frank mauser i'm an alcoholic and very glad to be the moderator of this cold newsletter workshop Does anyone that's a speed writer, though, who's got someone that's deaf and likes some information? want to copy that can sign here oh sorry yes is there some somewhat enmity tradition there may be some who are not familiar with our tradition of personal anonymity at the public level if so we respectfully ask that no aa speaker or member be identified by full name or picture in published or broadcast reports of our meeting the assurance of anonymity is essential to our efforts to help other alcoholics and our tradition of anonymism reminds us that a.a principles come before personalities okay uh i would just uh i'm just going to moderate this i'm not going to make any contributions except a comment about communications which is really the the overall umbrella subject that we're talking about today uh we have more than uh 24 000 groups in the us and canada about 39 000 contact points throughout the world and keeping us informed on each other is an incredible difficult task we all want fragments of information but often we're not we're not in a mind to pass off the information on to others that we do have. I know that's particularly true, like, in my group. Rarely does the secretary who's going out sit down and spend an hour or two hours to go over in a carefully and detailed manner the duties of a secretary. And that's true in every other area of communications within AA. We kind of assume that people will find their way. Some of us, joyously, do have skills in communication, writing communication. And this has helped smooth the way for those who follow us. And that basically is the subject today. We had, for example, 1,100 new Alcoholics Anonymous groups listed at the General Service Office just in the first three months of 1980. That's an astounding. It took us from 1935 to 1946 to get the first 1,000 groups in AA. We now get over 1, 000 groups in three months. So the need for communications is explosive. You know, things are happening that literally... I mean, I can, for example, I've been in the program 10 years, and there was a time I could go to the nucleus of meetings that I went to and know 80 to 90 percent of the people there at any particular meeting that's no longer true no matter how often i attend the meetings i mean i can go and there'll be a big chunk of people a third of the People i've never seen before and i i have to remind myself although i'm tired and full of my own sufferings and uh and crazies uh to go up and say hi uh i don't think i've seen you here before and uh and and start new relationships all the time although it's not always comfortable for me to do that and the same is true in the subject of newsletters the people on our panel have have agreed to share what their experiences are both their sufferings and their triumphs and their uh difficulties in in getting information together getting people to sit down and give them some information and then uh producing it in an organized fashion for distribution and distribution ain't easy even though we're hungry for information we rarely tell people how to get it to us for example at uh general service office who's probably uh in in the position of being the um the the office with the most help of getting up-to-date information to ourselves through the service structure all the 91 delegates and all their district committee people and the general service representatives, even though we have this big service apparatus, for every mailing we make, a box 459, which is our umbrella mailing to all members of the groups that we know are the general services representatives, we get 2,000 back that have moved and have no forwarding address. Those that can be forwarded are forwarded. And that's not only a costly thing, but it's very discouraging. It means that although we get 400 changes of addresses a week, those people haven't told us that they've moved. So they don't get their newsletter, that particular mailing. And I'm sure the other members of the panel have that same kind of experience. That's enough input for me. The format of the meeting is the panelists will share their experience, what they have, and what time we have left will be for comments from the audience and questions to the panelists. Our first participant will be Sue from the Hudson Mohawk Berkshire section. Sue lives in Albany. Sue? Hi, my name is Sue, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, I needed that. I always need that. As Frank mentioned, I am representing, at least in terms of newsletters, the Hudson-Mohawk-Berkshire area of New York State. And in our area, we have rotating chairs that ultimately lead to delegate from treasurer, secretary, chairman, chairperson, and then delegate. Every two years, a new treasurer is elected by our area assembly, and each person moves up a chair. I am the area secretary, and one of my responsibilities is to put out a monthly HMD newsletter. I am totally responsible for it in that I write it edited stuffing envelopes I have some help the help is a husband named Walter two lovely children Bridget and Shawn and these are these are my help mates and once a month after I type up a newsletter and we've made 275 envelopes and we then proceed to stuff the envelopes in send them out before I give you a little input on what goes in the newsletter I will tell you that we like the 15 cents to go a very long way so we put in to each newsletter the next month's intergroup which in our area is held on the second sunday of the month we have a newsletter very new and um doing very very well it's called beyond the walls and it's our institution bulletin and whenever it's possible that goes into the envelope and gets mailed out along with the newsletter and all of the other information anything of any kind of special nature flyers or whatever whatever we can fit in to that to that envelope and send out uh we try to do um i really when i came into aa i didn't know much of anything about anything i had been drinking quite a number of years and probably out of 20 years drinking I I probably matured about six months or maybe five months so I was just a baby and when I walked into my first AA meeting I walked in to my group without realizing it I bumped into a man who watched me very carefully for about three months and then got me very active and from then on I got very active in AA which is one of the reasons I guess that I was privileged enough to be elected to be on our area committee so I knew really nothing or didn't have any kind of self-esteem and each time that someone took my hand and led me down another boulevard or street or or a point of action in this program i learned that either i didn't have talents for things or if i i wasn't quite as talented as maybe i thought i should be people in my area said okay kid just keep in there and keep punching and it will be okay taking over the newsletter to me was was both exciting because there were some things I wanted to do and and yet I was concerned because I thought I hope I hope i will be able to communicate with the rest of the area so far I've gotten tremendous pleasure of all the duties that this chair holds, and its GSR changes and group changes and some of the things that Frank was mentioning, you know, making sure that everything is up to date and gotten to GSO. The newsletter has been the high point. And it's a very simple newsletter, and being a very practical, tremendous individual, well, I didn't even bring one to show you. I just happened to think about it five minutes ago when he asked Frank, and he said if you got it, fine, and if you don't, don't worry about it. So I won't worry About It. But we basically do the newsletter either on an 8x11 or 8x14 sheet, sometimes a couple of sheets. We ask for any group anniversaries that are coming up to have people and groups write in so that we can announce them in the next newsletter. We always announce the upcoming intergroup, and any kind of AA news that's pertinent to our area or to AA as a whole, we try to encourage people from the area to either call or to write or to get in contact uh and and uh we try very hard to get this into the newsletter too because i believe for me anyway the communication is the most important link that we have with each other and if people don't know uh they can't help they can attend they can be there and and so kind this is kind of what i'm trying to do with this newsletter is to at least make people aware and and i constantly try to put into each newsletter to um ask the gsrs which is basic group of members that that we send a newsletter to to to share this with the group bring the newsletter to the to the group meetings and either post it or or make the announcements that are relevant for the following month. The newsletter also goes to the area committees, to the district committee members, to alternate GSRs whose names and addresses we do have. I think I must tell you about something because it's something that concerned me deeply. When an individual, a member from our area passes on we have like a memoriam section and it was strange about three months ago I had been doing the newsletter since the previous October a very very dear dear man passed away very unexpectedly and writing this was probably the most difficult thing I had ever done but I wanted to convey to those people who knew John and to those who maybe never met him what a wonderful person that that he was and um that he was gone but it's good to remember and so I agonized for a bit with it um and instead of the in memoriam or whatever and on the uh the header of it i started um because i thought of him with love in memory and so now that's kind of going to stick not that we like to think about people passing on but that is part of life death is part of life and so that's kind of come to be part of the newsletter it's very simple as I said and for someone who is as inexperienced as myself it's very good. I'm trying to think of other things that go into it, but basically it's AA news, any kind of group anniversaries, anything that pertains to the area. The International, we wrote on an offer over a year about the International, about conventions coming up, little reminders we also have an institution in PI committee and we try every month to get something about those committees into the newsletters whenever it's possible to and just reach out to other people and then I guess it comes right back down to that for me because when I first came into to AA you reached out and I don't know why and I don't question why the good Lord intended me for service work but he's got me here and and I keep being prodded on to do it and it's become infectious with me addictive and at least for today I think it's going to continue that way i want to tell you that i'm very very glad to be here in new orleans i'm very glad to be sharing with you it's lovely to walk down the street and see your smiles and your ah the being of aa is in this beautiful super dome it's in this city it's in the hotel we're staying at it's all over and um it's the most beautiful experience thus far for today that i've had thank you all and god bless you thank you very much sue for your participation i uh just following up on her last remarks about seeing the people to see a hundred thousand little yellow tags running all over bourbon street it's quite an experience i couldn't believe it last night by the way i was requested to make an announcement that uh jim mack who doesn't know marty f but marty's here oh there's jim and there's marty now isn't that nice they met here at this newsletter workshop our next uh speaker is uh one of the people i mentioned earlier with it with a lot of skills in writing uh who aa has uh always been blessed with every once in a while we're sent somebody that does have particular skills in writing and helps us to get to another place. And Mel B. from Toledo, Ohio, will share his experiences in getting a newsletter started. How do you get it started? Mel? Thanks, Frank. I'm Mel Barger. I'm from Toleto, Ohio. I'm an alcoholic. uh frank said i was going to talk about how to get a newsletter started uh i think that our situation in toledo is how to get one restarted this is really what we're doing you would our situation in toLEDO is we have a news newsletter that is more or less in transition and i would like to cover a little bit of the background on that and what we're trying to do to get our newsletter in shape so that it will serve our area in the right way. In Toledo, we had a newsletter for many years that was edited and published by one of our older members. We always thought, most of us thought it was an area newsletter. It was called the Toledo Area News, and we thought of it as belonging to all AAs, but really it was a personal venture by this older member. and he did a fine job. He had four or five hundred subscribers. He and his wife, who was also an AA member, put it out, and really they did a good job. They went around and buttonholed people for subscriptions at five dollars a year and they wrote very good letters persuading people to write for the publication and they handled it very well. Once in a while we had some problems. Sometimes he would editorialize a little bit Well, incidentally, I'd like to introduce the Toledo contingent over here. They came along to monitor what I was going to say. This is Jerry and Denny and Bud and Bill from Toledo, the one they call Bill. He calls himself S.O.B., which is Sweet Old Bill. anyway uh this older member who edited the publication once in a while he would editorialize a little bit i remember when we would have our anniversary a few years ago we'd run out of salad and we'd really catch hell for running out of salads you know caterer would have promised us 20 times that we'd have enough salad and if we ran out we'd certainly hear about it in the toledo area news and when you worked your heart out it was kind of gratuitous you didn't really appreciated all that much. And once in a while, he would also give his opinion on the Vietnam War and things like this, you know. But really, these were minor things because he did such a good job that nobody really took issue with it most of the time. And he had four or five hundred subscribers, and he covered a lot of the local things really well about members' anniversaries and people moving away where their new addresses were and memorials and things like this. But then what happened is suddenly last year he took ill and he died in a very short time. He got a terminal illness, and he was gone in just a short time, and his wife didn't feel she could carry it on, and suddenly there was nobody there to run the newsletter, and it was kicked back to the inner group. and suddenly we realized that it wasn't the hadn't been the inner group's newsletter it had just been run by this one older member and that was you know this is an experience in a.a that if we sometimes we let people run things and it's not being run by the group or the group conscience and then that person passes from the scene and we're left holding the bag i think that was the idea with bill w when he wanted to turn the responsibility for the whole fellowship over the membership was that these founders and people like that are mortal and this goes right on down to people who run intergroup newsletters you know they're mortal and if uh you've got to have the thing set up so that if one person leaves gets mad or dies or something else why the newsletter will go on so for a short time the thing just kind of drifted the inner group tried to run it and they didn't uh the different jobs weren't being handled right but finally they got a committee together a couple of members from the inner-group and a couple of the general service delegates a group a group delegate and our area delegate got a committee formed and we've been having meetings and we really are making progress in getting our newsletter straightened out so that it will serve the whole area now you know i brought only one sample of each one and i thought to myself i'll bet the lady from albany will have nice stacks of her publication and all i have are these one samples but anyway here they are it was called the toledo area news and this is the way it appeared when our older member was running it and we have changed the name now to the aa area news because we serve northwest ohio and southeastern michigan and so we don't want to just call it toledо we want it to be more the area it's area 55 actually and the newsletter is to serve that whole area and we even explained in the first edition here when issue here when we changed the name that we had got Toledo from the title so that it would be representative of all of area 55 in northwestern Ohio and southeastern Michigan. Whether you're in Lima, Ohio or Adrian, Michigan this newsletter is serving your group and then we also adopted a policy of trying to limit the articles to 250 words because you see were just a couple of sheets here, and 250 words is about the maximum. And what we're really running in this publication now, one of our members is a pretty good designer. He designed a new masthead for us, and he's also using a little clip art and other things. Now, this is published just by a multilift type of printing, so we don't have too much flexibility what we can do, but it is becoming more attractive i think one of our members on the committee does the typing uh but what we're trying to do is cover the local news oh one of the things also that came up when the inner group took it over was some of the members thought that publishing a newsletter was against their traditions that it was wrong to have a newsletter because after all we have the grapevine you know and so you don't have a right to publish a newsletter they thought but we discovered this was something we didn't know in the aa guidelines on running an inner group there's a section in there on newsletters and that's provided for in the guidelines that it's an area or a city or a group can have its own newsletter and that is perfectly permissible within the traditions so it's all provided for there so it is not against the traditions to have a newsletter. It's not like an AA club. An AA club is outside of the fellowship, really, but a newsletter is part of it. And it's spelled out there in the guidelines some suggestions on how to run the newsletter. So we got that straightened out. And then we had to decide on policies. We, of course, tried to follow the traditions in everything we put in the newsletter, observing people's anonymity and things like this. And we try to stick to stuff that's local. We don't try to compete with the grapevine. The grapevine is an international publication, and we're just concerned mostly about what's going on in Toledo as much as possible. We run some articles by members from Toledo, and the fact that these people are from Toleto, of course, makes it of local interest too. But our committee, we're finding that we have to make judgments about what to put in the newsletter. For example, we had a retreat recently, and several, it was just for women only, the retreat. I tried to get in, but they wouldn't let me. And it was Al-Anon and AA Women. And this retreat was a little bit outside of AA, and yet all of the people who went to it were AA members or Al-A-Nons, and we got three beautiful letters describing their feelings at the retreat and so on. So we had quite a discussion. At first, we weren't going to run the letters because the retreat had not been a regular AA activity. But then we decided that these letters had a legitimate place in the newsletter, but we couldn't run all three of them at once. So we ran one and we'll probably run the other two or do something with them because we want to encourage, if you keep throwing stuff out when people write articles or letters, then pretty soon your sources will dry up. And if people do write good material, if you can work it in without violating the traditions i think it's a good idea to do it so we felt that because it it was expressing their feelings and they had all been aa members attending this retreat uh this was a a good practice to to use these letters and uh things like this i just if you start getting too severe on what what you can run in there why pretty soon you're going to have a lot of trouble. But I think the fact that we now have the newsletter as part of the inner group, we have the group conscience working in running the newsletter, that this is going to be great for the future. We have one member who is running around doing a good job on getting subscriptions, while other members of the committee are trying to get subscriptions too. And we've got about 200 paid subscriptions now. We had 400 or 500 when this older member was running it you see it can run down real fast somebody has to take care of that and make sure that renewals that you get the renewals when the older subscriptions run out and so on but we have one this one person who's doing a good job on the subscription we have the man who's done a good on design we have several writers who are helping out and so we had the committee functioning we have woman who is running everything and making sure that I didn't mean that the way it sounded. She's actually a very fine person, and don't let this get back to Toledo. Ginny hears I said that, why she won't speak to me. And I think what we have now is that people will come and go on the committee, and we'll have people responsible for putting the newsletter out, and it won't be dependent on any one person and this is it will be the the putting out the newsletter will be the function of the inner group and i think that eventually we'll be doing as good a job as this older member was doing both in subscriptions and editorially and everything else and that the members of the area will look upon it more as their newsletter it does have a part in aa It does serve a communications function at the local level. It does a job that Grapevine doesn't do and that other publications don't do. So it's worthwhile to keep it up. It's part of our purpose of carrying the message to others. And I'm happy to be part of it. I think it's part OFAA service to be involved in the newsletter. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mel. And particularly thank you for touching on financing. You know, how do you get the money to keep the thing going and to keep it up to date? Our next participant is from the Tidewater area of Virginia, and Johnny J. Thank you. Thank you so much. My name is Johnny Johnson. I'm an alcoholic. uh after listening to these i think i'd better go back and do a little history also we started about uh four or five years ago the thing that jim mentioned at the beginning recognizing that a lot of times the things that you do routinely somebody leaves for some reason dies gets taken suddenly drunk or uh moves from the area and you find that somebody is not doing the job so we decided we'd try to write up a job description basically is what it started out of what you were responsible for not so necessary what how to do it but what you would expect it to be responsible for much like the aa group pamphlet and this was the intergroup now the tidewater intergroup uh has about a hundred and some meetings or about one-sixth of all of the meetings in the state of Virginia, which is our area. So we have roughly one-sixth of the alcoholics covered in the State of Virginia. So our inner group does more towards us than the general service organization, although they work very closely together, of course. They had been working on this for some time and suddenly we got slapped with some back tax or something like $4,500 of back taxes we were supposed to do when we said well we better find out something. I won't go into the details because it's still kicking that around but it took us several years and we ended up that we had to actually form a corporation within the intergroup itself in order to get that straightened out and while they were doing it they took these things that they've been working on some of the older members two or three of the state delegates and whatnot on this job description for in a group and uh it so happened that i was out of the country i'd been very active in a in the city and my sponsor she mentioned ann mentioned a while ago that they watched her for a couple three months and put her to work my sponsor who became my sponsor later watched me about a month and put me to work and uh the uh he still does it but the When I came back, I looked him up. He was DCM from Virginia Beach. The Tidewater area covers Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and then some surrounding counties. It goes extensive, about 50 miles by roughly 40 miles. So it's a fairly large area and very populated in one corner of that. The rest, most of it is farmland and small towns. so our distribution problem is a little bit different from some of the others but when they got this together he just I told him I'd help him out with anything before because he and I had worked with forming a institutional committee and PIO committee we combined it earlier with half a dozen other people so when I came back I knew he was still doing this sort of thing so I told him might be happy to help him well about this time he got elected chairman in a group and he said we need a newsletter. We had had newsletters before but it was much like the one that was described here. I'll give you the name of it, it was Heartline so you get an idea of what type articles were in that. It was heavy on the editor's opinion of various things in AA although again it was something that was done from the heart was done well for the most part but it didn't carry much news it carried opinions and feelings and things of this nature so I said well I would I would attempt it but I wanted to find out about it so I read everything I could that GSO had on newsletters that was mentioned here I went to in a group and I didn't know who were supposed to be sponsoring this thing and asked him if what they wanted i talked to gso gsr and asked them what they wanted i talk to the public information we have a very active public information group now cpc group and also uh institutional committee in the area so i talked to all of them and they told me basically what they wanted i asked i went to every one of them i said what do you want if we get a newsletter going because i still wasn't committed to it fully and it turned out that they said see what we do and what's going on is not getting to the people uh in all the groups or in the area in other words what's going on so we basically came up well if we had these various meetings nearly all of them have minutes if we could sort of condense the minutes and take the high points this is what we would do the service information in other words and then we would fill it with other information to get it started in a group committed themselves to $50 a month to start or something like that I forgot what figure they gave I tried to get my finances straightened first I want to know what I could spend before I started that's an old hangover from being in the Navy they had we asked for volunteers from both GSR and Intergroup that it had any experience with newsletters I would like to get some experience to form a committee and there was about 30 people showed up the first time and we sat down and hashed over what were ideas we told them it didn't have to work but just come in and give us ideas and we worked and ended up with about six of those stuck around and started doing the work and they still are it's not too much of the active duty except getting the news we found that news gathering was a problem so what we do is uh we put a deadline on everything we don't carry the group users anniversaries and so forth unless they get it there on a certain date if they got it fine and we have room that goes in we don't have room he gets left out we sat down with that committee though and decided what would go in the news we didn't have to worry about the priorities he's talking about because we decided right then and there the committee this is what we thought should go into the newsletter and in the priority this will go first and after that uh for example in a group uh the minutes of the intergroup meeting was first the minute of the gsr meeting was second and then your al-anon our team etc any of their business meetings those would go in first also a calendar uh the well i'm getting ahead of myself but we try to carry the calendar of events that were coming up of interest to you we didn't care who sponsored them as long as aas were probably going to it for whatever reason uh we decided to carry it we are not tied down to anything as uh we have to clear with any committee uh as grapevine has a problem with exactly what they can carry box 459 probably less of a problem but we basically carried the type information that box 45 9 carries if you're familiar with that and then sort of secondary would pick up a little bit of stuff like great vine care so we're a little but that's sort of a low priority the we became a committee of in a group and we have to report to them every month what we're doing or what's going on and various anything that happens on it as i said we wrote the committee guidelines including the priority of the content uh came up with a name for the magazine uh for the thing and the name was uh very easy it came up very easy so happened we own a clubhouse there i was on harmony road which we thought was a nice name and we We came up with the address, and it said 1153 Harmony Road. So we called it Harmony 1153. Eventually, we dropped 1153, and we came up with a logo, printed the first edition, and then had everybody critique it. We had another big meeting, said anybody want to come in and tell us what we should do? After that, we also carried it to professionals. It so happened that my son-in-law is an editor of a newspaper, so I carried it down to him said okay what can i do to make this better and meanwhile we had two or three reporters and uh editors of uh people who are involved in news who are uh managers of tv stations so forth that were willing to look it over and who are in the program and make comments so each time we started this is what we did uh we were told for example that get a get a mask head get something that stands out that catches this what isn't tell them right at the beginning this is a publication for alcoholics nanos in tidewater area something of this nature tell where you can something in there who publishes it so we carry this on the back page uh and sure that we did state the purpose of this uh identify the publisher uh then we came up with they broke down a use of columns and lines and pictures and so forth and how you why put something on the front page or the back page. We went into all of this stuff and tried to come up with some sort of format for it to provide emphasis or to break up the items from one to the other, and yet do it without sacrificing a lot of room. And if you leave space between things, by the time you leave eight to ten articles, there's eight or ten lines, you could probably squeeze them together by just drawing a line and you could get another eight to ten lines in on something else. Use of drawings and pictures and what when to leave them out and when to use them we did all this sort of stuff we discussed the size of it we had tried different sizes and finally came up with the size that's here and can be folded in fact it is we designed it so that the back page is a calendar of all events coming up and you can just post that on your bulletin board in your group meeting and anybody can include it and we've had people say they tried to change meetings and they said they've learned they can't change meetings if it's published here at a wrong date they better go meet that wrong day so it's working uh the we've done things like experimenting with color uh it cost about four dollars more an issue to put it out in color instead of black and white by just using the color. And we changed the color each month, just rotated around so that old coppers laying around it stood out like a sore thumb that you've got the wrong one. We're expanding Manning right now. We haven't done any of it yet but we've found a printer that will do this thing. If we take it to a certain date he prints red on Tuesdays and blue on Wednesdays and green on Thursdays and it doesn't cost us any additional So we could try to go the other way and use the colored ink on white paper, see if they like that. The last three or four issues have been strictly black and white. But so there's all different ways you can do it. We tried to find out all the limits and capabilities. Went to the printers and said, okay, you're the experts. Tell us what's the best way to do this. And this was not hard. We found a good Al-Anon printer that an old friend from years back used to do a lot of drinking with him. happens that got hold of him and he gave us a lot of good ideas we're not necessarily we used him for some time but we use a different printer right now just because it's uh convenient uh as i said we've used box 459 as our guide a great deal and we often quote articles from that or take take a little bit of the article enough to make people go read the rest of it in box 45 9. we exchange editions with other of newsletters, and if any of you have a newsletter or like exchange, if you pick up a copy of this before you leave, and the next time you mail a copy, mail it to the address on the back, Market Attention Newsletter Editor, and we'll see that you get and say that you want to be on our mailing list. We'll be happy to do it. As I said, we don't limit it. We watch for any kind of articles. We use newspaper reporters that are in the fellowship. They write articles for us occasionally. They'll condense articles. We have them read whatever they want to. If it interests them, they want to write a little thing on it. Only thing is we ask them to use 40 lines, 40 characters per line space, which saves us a lot of editorialing. What's the word I want? Editorializing. Okay, all right. It saves us a lot of trouble. But we use things from the medical school we work. We do a lot o' work with, and I won't go into that, but we do a lotta work with the medical schools, so they give us things that come out of medical journals. We have a good rapport with the two or three universities around there. They give us articles and keep us informed, and the Tide Board of the State Rehab and Drug and Alcohol Abuse Program. Of course, there's a lot AA's on that board, so but they keep us informed what's going on and so i think we get a pretty good coverage and keep the aas informed of what's gone we list what college courses that might appeal to aa or family services things of this nature as i said we do all of these things but we've tried to keep the primary purpose and content is always what goes on in the business meetings and if we have room we put the other things there people send in portrait we like or people send them and things, it just gets shoved aside. And if we end up, well, can we use an article three inches wide or four inches long, whatever it might be. And that just comes up as we go. Anything that's sent to us is just on a if we have space, when we have place. And people are willing to do this, and it helps us a lot. Basically, we had said the business meetings first was the Intergroup Council, GSR, Al-Anon, Alateen, and our service club has business meetings, and we keep people informed because many of our meetings are held at two or three meetings a day at the service club. So to sum up, first of all for us it was to find out what everybody wanted, second find out how to do it, and third do it. The fourth we look for a better way and fifth we strive for perfection. I have samples here and I have a group which I haven't laid out I thought I'd just lay them out up here on the floor in a little while to show you you can just look at them visually i'll just lay them out i don't have all a copy of every thing we've only been going about to get two years right less than two years now but i have most of the months additions you can see i think it's just walking down you can say how we progressed i think we are going a little bit better as we go along uh and i'll lay those out there but anything that's on the table here you're welcome to take the ones down on the floor after everyone's seen them you can take those. I'll be here to try to answer any questions on details of format or why we did this or that, distribution problems. Our distribution, as I said, was unique because we have so many meetings there in a week that we leave half of our, we make 1,000 copies, 500 goes to the service club. We mail out about 100 and we have two very large meetings. We try to get them a number of copies so they can distribute them and they get of course taken back to their own groups and we mail out oh i'd say about 50 copies or more each month roughly and our 50 addressed places some of them of course get many copies all the smaller cities where they have to go more than five or ten miles to get to the club or to the intergroup office is the other distribution point uh people uh we will mail to the those which is uh paid for by intergroup and it's uh we have a mailing uh bill of about uh 15 16 dollars i think it is for our mailing each month and uh we haven't since then because we were uh at corporation now we do have a bulk mailing permit, and if we get up to the point where we can get out 200 mailing or up to 50 pounds off a guy to something like that, which we're working to, then we can mail for about three cents. I think it just went from 3.1 to 3.4 in the last week or two cents per copy instead of paying 15 cents. So we would like to eventually get onto a mailing system, and one of our good members says he has his company has just putting in computers and he said he'd be happy to uh computerize it run it off on gum label for us if we pay for the materials but he would do the programming and see that we got a new list and update it every month so we're working in that and uh if there's any questions be happy to answer and thank you for inviting me here thank you very much johnny i i got a lot from that i i know we at the office have a particular problem not only in distribution i mentioned the 2 000 per mailing that are returned and basically about 10% of our list is obsolete and undeliverable, but also the fact that it's hard to get it beyond the recipient. The person who gets it might read it, but it's harder to motivate them to share it with other members of the group. I mean, at one time we even offered them free in bulk quantities to the recipients, and that was kind of sadly... People said no in large numbers, that they did not want them, and it was just kind of too much of an effort to look into the distribution. Our final participant is Jim from Chicago, who has perhaps the oldest continually published newsletter and certainly one of the most widely known within the fellowship. And it's always well read at the office, so I'm anxious to hear Jim's sharings on this. Jim? Thank you. And I apologize to Jim for not being printed on our program. he was one of the first that was issued an invitation and one ofthe first to accept it and for some reason our printer just left off his name I could have killed myself thanks Frank good afternoon my name is Jim English and I'm a great poor alcoholic hi and I know about printers I'm an astereotyper by trade so uh i worked in the newspapers and know a little about that it's good to be here this morning and five years ago in denver i spoke on public information out and how it was handled by the central office and what we did and did not do a fellow member on that panel who was a delegate from delaware has since passed away bill cochran and i was thinking of him this morning i'm office manager of the chicago area central office our editor ken roush of his house not attending the convention due to business commitments in reference to topics this afternoon newsletters and bulletins i thought i would bring out that our newsletter is really our minutes from our district service meetings which are held every other month one week previous to our chicago service committee meeting the central office sends out the to the districts topics we feel are pertinent and should be discussed also information pertaining to conventions information on central office mailings which we have which are numerous the central offices need for information on new groups or time changes of meetings people available for 12-step calls and when the new directory is being printed and available so we get the last minute changes in on this. All the general information we have available to better inform the groups of just what is going on in Chicago Area Alcoholics Anonymous and the central office. This then is discussed at the district service meeting, and the wishes of the members are brought by their delegates to the Chicago Area Service Committee meeting. We conduct all the business and affairs of Chicago Area alcoholics anonymous previous to the district meetings. The Finance Committee with the hospital and institutions, and the public information meeting with one representative from each of our ten districts hopefully in attendance make the decisions and plan ways we may be more effective in carrying the message of recovery to the public. We have mailed in the past years letters offering our services to both doctors and clergymen with sample pamphlets enclosed. Also a reply card offering a free amount of literature for their asking our hospital and institution committee members know the hospitals in their areas and their needs as each new treatment unit opens we offer our services and availability and establishment a working relationship within the traditions of alcoholics anonymous in this way the requests for volunteers to conduct meetings are handled in the district We have our usual problems with correctional institutions, such as volunteers' claims through the state approval, resident lockups, dropping tiers late, getting meetings started on time, and on and on. All of the above is brought out in our minutes. At the Chicago Area Service Committee meeting, the Finance Committee Chairman gives a report on the Finance Community. also the hospital and institution and the public information committee chairman give their report as does the editor of here's how the grapevine representative the general service delegate and the office manager all of this vital information is shared at the chicago area service committee meeting the last tuesday of the month i can't imagine anywhere more open and informative of meeting with all the information shared made available to all groups through our minutes from this meeting we usually have four or five pages of minutes which are mailed to every general service representative or secretary of each group hoping that they in turn will read or have the members read and discuss what had transpired at the chicago area service committee meeting we have 10 districts and 1500 groups one representative for each 11 groups the members then know that they have a vital and responsive committees this in turn makes for more informed groups it all also has reflected in our growth and financial stability i felt the need to explain on how information in our area pertaining to area service area business general service office and General Service conference reports, but central office information is disseminated to groups in our area. Our central office was the first of its kind, started in 1940. Our early members numbered many feature writers and three were editors from various newspapers. They wrote most all of the pamphlets that we call Chicago Area Literature. It was their impressions, experience, and views of how the program was working in their life. You have to remember this was when there was no conference-approved literature for sale at that time. We were most fortunate to have these gifted and talented members fill the void. They were not just average newspaper people. All of them left their mark in history in Chicago and international journalism. It was decided in May 1949 to start a publication for the membership in the area. It was on a monthly basis at that time, 12 issues a year for a dollar, if you could afford it. If you couldn't afford it, you received it if you wished. We now have six issues ayear. This is our publication, Here's How. And we two, each issue maybe a little different color and different logo one day at a time. is on this our financial report is published in this this issue and uh i know in some uh i know some in the audience are thinking you know i i sent in my subscription i didn't receive it yet so some of that sometimes this happens too you know we get a lot of calls that they had sold out But we also have a subscription request that we start putting in in case somebody gets hold of one that didn't send in their name that they can just fill it out and get it in. It was first started with the idea of sharing with the groups what was happening in the grown Chicago area, newer groups, social events, and other happenings. A constant appeal for funds at that time to help keep the central office in operation. It evolved to what it is now, articles on traditions and steps, articles of a general nature on sponsorship, spiritual growth, and personal experiences in our inner life. We have 15,000 subscribers, and it has mailed all over the world into about 30 prison groups. Less than half our subscribers contribute to the publication. Our subscription costs have increased from $1 to $2 in 31 years. Unfortunately, production costs have not fared that well. However, we have managed to hold our deficit down fairly well. We feel anything of importance in the way of information for the groups deserves a special mailing. Our service structure, Secretary's manual, directory of hospitals and detoxification centers in the Chicago area, which has on the front guidelines for hostile treatment with the Illinois state law dealing with the intent that legislation to recognize public inebriation as a sickness. That's all on the font. A letter to all groups on the non-alcoholic addict, which was a reproduced position paper from General Service Office with enclosure excerpts on problems other than alcohol. All of these we feel would be lost in here's how or our minutes With the special mailings, it is recognized as special and personal to the group member and stresses the importance of both the material sent and the group receiving it to Chicago Area Alcoholics Anonymous. I know that from the booklets and pamphlets mentioned above, we received phone calls saying that they sparked a lively discussion at the groups meeting the previous evening, and the members felt they better understood more about just what AA does and does not do in working with the newcomer within a hostile setting. One of our biggest and continuing problems is the obtaining of written contributions from our membership. We make personal appeals through our GSIs and written appeal through our publications. We are fortunate in that we have over 30 years of back issues which we can draft on for future articles. poems. Plenty of them, and for this reason we do not print them. Some guy's got a deal going now where he's got to book you some poems and they'll publish it for $5 a hymnacy and I bet he makes a ton. Some of them are good, most of them aren't. We may not set ourselves up as literary critics, but if we printed one poem, we would have to print them all, resulting in an issue of nothing but poems. This policy was established many years ago and has worked well for us. And I couldn't help but thinking, too, about this person that you felt played such an important part in your life and who had died. We at one time would put a certain person in a certain area that was a member for many years and had a great influence in that area and say he died. And they would put in a little memorial and so on and so forth well none of we got bigger and more people you know were doing more within their group and all of a sudden uh maybe we wouldn't be notified about a certain person's passing and it didn't make an issue or all of A sudden well this guy isn't as important as that guy you know and uh we had a lot of phone calls so-and-so didn't get in how come didn't write about this guy and so we just decided no more memoriams you know uh he's done his share and he got his reward and that's it so but that's you know that's the way it had to be because we were alienating people we weren't you know helping we're having all kinds of little things and we didn't need there we also avoided listing new groups contributions and as i say obituaries there are two main reasons for this first our chicago area covers so much territory we would have to extend from 8 to 16 pages to give full and equal coverage to all groups secondly we do not feel that the primary purpose of here's how is to disseminate this type of material our primary purpose is to carry the message we also give special notice to state conferences and national happenings also we feel it as our obligation to keep our readers informed of the availability of new literature at the chicago area service office our editorial policy is very simple keep it simple we do this by avoiding controversy we do not editorialize we will however report on outside information and issues as objectively as possible without making value judgments uh he's got here on this one thing uh the rand report i remember when it first come out and he had called me up and we talked about it. And I said, you know, we'll steer clear of that. We don't want to get in a random report, that's for sure. And because all of a sudden again you would be getting into areas we felt that we shouldn't. We also get a lot of phone calls about swearing at meetings. So he had an article in there, Clean Up Your act and uh hand holding we got into that one guy one guy wrote him a letter about how come they're holding hands and the next thing you know we got letters why and throwing count on that and your father too and you know it's just uh it just started getting away from us so we dropped this we also feel an obligation to the fellowship and our readers to edit articles but I have a sense of intangible language or ethnic slur to a particular group. And I just thought I brought a whole bunch of things that we did make mailings on. And also, this was the one for the non-alcoholic addict that we made a special mailing on. To the groups when they contribute to the Chicago Area Service Office, we send back a thank you letter and in this i can give you i'll read this letter and it's kind of an idea of what more information is shared on behalf of chicago area alcoholics anonymous with the central office wish to thank you and your group for your group's contribution it is the beginning of a new year and having just closed out 1979 we had a chance to review our progress and good fortune and having the support of the groups that make up chicago area alcoholics anonymous in review we had two printings of our chicago area meeting directory for a total of thirty thousand booklets in our last printing we added four more pages over a hundred new groups in the last year we did this to ensure the directory is as current as possible we have meetings going with old jolly yet and are resuming meetings at stateful these are our institutions the directory of hospitals and detoxification centers in chicago area was updated and sent to all group members we have many requests from social agencies and people in the helping profession for this pamphlet saying it is invaluable to them we feel of great help to our fellow members we held our all chicago open meeting at mcdonough temple with an attendance of 3 000 with the true representation of alcoholics anonymous from three fine speakers we're able to reduce our conference approved books and literature due to your contributions our membership is continually growing in this area we need your help for our after hour answering service and we sold over 164 727 dollars in books and literature our group and individual contribution totaled at that time 84 536 dollars this year we are nearly in the enviable position of having reached our six-month prudent reserve more will follow on this subject we had over 10 000 12-step calls received at your tent at your central office and dispatched to groups nearest where the person lives this is not counting the thousands of calls for al-anon referrals information call speaker requests which we filled 132 from the central office sending free literature when we requested. We were, on your behalf, able to donate to hospitals and institutions in our area $1,227 in books and literature. Our public information amounted to $1.280 for people who carried the message to schools, fraternal organizations, radio, TV, and business employers. We will have our 45th anniversary International AA Convention July 3rd through 6th at New Orleans, Louisiana. And I hope to see you there. And we sent out a position paper to all groups pertaining to the non-alcoholic addict plus a pamphlet and closed. Problems other than alcohol. We mailed to 500 doctors in the South and Southeast areas a letter and pamphlets offering our help if they had someone to recommend with a drinking problem. We also made a mailing to 500 ministers with pamphelets and closed in response on both were gratifying. The whole service and operation of the central office depends upon the support of all groups in Chicago Area Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a year we feel much was accomplished. Without your moral and financial support, this could not have happened. Again, we say thanks to you and your group for making all this possible. So in all of these letters, these thank-you letters, we continually update them that the people in the area know what is going on. And these are our proceedings of the Chicago Area Service Committee our last meeting which we had the finance report the hospital institution report and i think if you depend on people in other say in the others from the finance committee to give the report you'll get about that much so we have a person from the staff of the central office sit in and take the notes of this meeting and you get a far different picture than if the chairman would be trying to take notes conduct the meeting what have you and the same in the hospital institution committee the same on the public information committee here's how general service conference all of the what went on there as our delegate brought this back the grapevine and the office managers report and these are our minutes that are mailed to each and every group this is our directory of hostels and detoxification centers in the chicago area with all the hospitals listed on the back uh the detoxification centers and halfway houses and we made enough so everybody would have one each and every member and i think it's invaluable because most of the time the calls you get are you know at kind of odd times in the morning this was the ram report restudies alcoholism drink remains a villain drink remains a villain so we didn't get into it but we we published after they found out that they were missing the results that we cleared that up for him and and then we we have a little thing when we make the mailing of here's how once a year with a little envelope enclosed and it's got on there help help help here's here's i need your support now please return your donation using the enclosed envelope folded such as this and sent out and that's about what i have to say i just wish to thank you for the opportunity uh to share these experiences with you the most important thing to us is our communicating we are only as good as the information we receive i remember we have an after hour answering service book and we check every Every year of all these names we have, and we get new group information sheets back. In some of the suburban areas where there would be maybe three people, I would call them myself at night if we couldn't reach them in the day. And usually it would be a group. If you've got three or four names, you've Got one group in a little area. And I'd call up and I'd talk to this one guy and rather than maybe call the other three guys, I would say, and how's Charlie, and Charlie's fine, and how is Harry? Harry's fine. And how's Vince?" There'd be a long pause, and the guy would say, "'Vince is dead.'" I could just see him going to the meeting that night and say, you know, there's dummies from the downtown office call and they don't know Vince is dead. But Vince can't tell us. Somebody's got to give us this information, and that's what everything depends upon And with a group closing, a group shutting down, a group folding, a new group starting, time changes. And we look bad on a lot of these things. But people just figure, well, they know down there. But we don't know unless we get the information or the phone call. So this is very important. I just want to thank you again for listening this morning and having the opportunity to talk from our experiences in the Chicago area, Alcoholics Anonymous. I think individually and collectively the panelists have given us a lot of stuff to think about and a lot things to share. Additionally, Marshall from the Greater Columbia Intergroup has given us some samples of their newsletter. So I'll leave these here for you to look over. I think we have time for questions, comments to the panelists on any subject that you think might not have been covered, and we'll do that as long as we can. This gentleman here? One thing I'd like to add, if I can get involved in what you put into it, I think it's pretty well covered. We're in the central Jersey area. You talk about money, finance. We've made a crisis to give away our U.S. dollars. The one-page 8 1⁄2 by 11, we spent about $500 and we just distribute them. Now how does it get paid? How do we pay for it? We pay for by group contributions to our members. And we do the same thing with our meeting groups. I think it's probably the only area in the United States where every new member can take up a meeting with, without scrounging around and getting some old used-up newsletters. So, the idea of having subscribers for a newsletter means you're limiting the distribution. It's a self-defeating thing, and it's something that's one and a half. Thank you, my friend. Lady there... Oh, yeah, just a second. The panelists are going to comment on it. folks this is not our minutes these are just stories in here you know our minutes it goes to all the groups and there's no charge on that you're talking about 500 we're talking about 15 000 you know uh subscriptions we they take subscriptions but it's donations uh it's It's, you know, if a person don't have it, he gets it anyway if he wishes it. So there is a vast difference. This runs $14,000 a year for 12 issues. Our mailing, it's 3.1% on bulk mailing. Yeah, and that runs $450-some every two months. also on the returns which are numerous because we're moving people over a quarter we pay for every time you get one of these back so there's a cost factor there and I would say to in our directories we print 15,000 directories and there are 58 pages in there you know it's not just the one sheet or two sheeters 58 pages so somebody's got to pay for that paper and it's up-to-date you know it's up to date as it can be we do the same most about the distributed free and then the only ones a dollar 25 for six months subscription was just trying this now to see if we can get up to 200 so we can give reduced cost on it dollar we figured the cost of this for six month would be a dollar 24 and a half cents or something so we had a dollar twenty five so that's we tried to sell it get it to them at cost uh the hmv news i um didn't mention in the beginning because i was so blasted nervous we we also uh there are no subscriptions we send to every gsr in the area to every alternate that we have that requests and um to anyone that actually requests or that feel needed you know within the area committee the dcm's or anyone who might say to me gee i you know uh we don't get these in our group and if you send me one i promise we'll get them to the group and you can bet your boots so we send it to him if we can get it to the group thanks thank you very much hi hi One of the things I'd like to know is how do you go about getting an indicia or a non-profit organization indicia? Mailing. Low-cost, non-proper mailing. Does anyone have experience with this? Let me repeat the question. The question was, how do you obtain an indicia so that you can mail the publication at the lowest possible cost? I just went through it. I'm also a published chairman for our state convention, so I had to do that. It's no major problem. Just go to the post office, but they will require you to present something to indicate that you're a nonprofit organization. So you'll have to have something in writing from somebody. usually it has to come from internal revenue to indicate that or a if you've got a uh uh carpet as i was you take your state corporation papers showing it's your non-profit and then they uh and then you can also go get a bulk mailing if you're not non-car but just a a half a cent more for mailing something like that uh what it depends on your state your individual state would take that you have to get If you see one of your lawyers in your group and ask him, he doesn't tell you about it. Hi. Terrific. Do not at two. Any other questions? Yes, gentleman in the back. Jim, would you repeat that question and then answer it, please? Yeah. We tried to... We felt that in our publication we could not get into all of the business that was carried on you know within uh the area because we we got a whole finance committee meeting our hospital institution committee meeting the public information even on here's how which is our publication there it goes to here the general service conference grapevine office managers report now here's house started in 1949 with a far different thing the minutes were sent to every group and discussed and it's up to date as possible here's how is just like stories like uh grapevine that deal with sponsorship traditions 12 steps and stories of that nature it's altogether different than you know other area bulletin in the beginning They had just group news, dinners and dances and social happenings and here's how. But it evolved into something like this. So we've kept it separate and apart from the business that goes on in Chicago area such as that. This pertains to group information so to speak. The people will not pay for this. this is what they expect you know this is their business meetings and let's happen at the business meeting surely they're not going to pay for that so this is since every group this is separate and apart from that these are feature stories so to speak hi um they have overall we've been able to explain it Mm-hmm. Thank you very much. The question concerns itself with dividing AA information that deals specifically with AA matters, group information, and things of that nature from the non-AA information, things of retreats and treatment centers and detoxification units and that kind of information, which are also sought by our members as interesting and useful in their lives. But how do you separate them so it looks like we're not endorsing any particular religious retreat or not endorsING any particular treatment center? So would any of the panelists like to, Jim? I remember sometime back, here's how, before I got into the central office, was doing some articles on hospitals you know like a certain treatment center they tell about the type of program they had and to me i always thought we were giving tacit approval to whatever they do uh it's funny there was a guy in here that today and he gave me a couple of marbles you know and i've had people call me up at the central office and ask for area marbles you know this is the and i said no kidding you can get them at walgreens it's all right you know but it's it's funny if we give anything people pick up a retreats a hospital you know a marvel anything so we have to really or i feel we have to really draw the line that uh we don't we don t have anything to do with with that retreats are usually run uh by a catholic you know there's 25 and we even try to when they come out with flyers they'd have these aa retreats and we'd say it's a retreat where a members attend it's not an a retreat and we have to keep you know informing them of this so we just don't have anything as about hospitals if we do it's separate and apart it's not in our publications that's why i say we make special mailings to inform the groups but it's not in out publication you know it's separate and apart and that's the way we try to keep them we'll take one more comment of, you know, the gratitude banquet and anything sponsored by any group or by the group. Now, there are certain, quote, retreats or AA gatherings, a lot of gatherings that are AA-oriented. As editor, I can put incoming events and lists, bake gals, all the meetings, something like that uh father fred just was ready to retreat i know i wanted to go and things like that but it's just listed as something that we have members of aaa and al-anon okay um yeah go ahead please okay the thing that i think is maybe a miss i went through it rather hastily what helped us a great deal was get your committee together for your local group and decide what you want to be in it then your committee gets on it take it to your inner group or gsr and say this is what we want to put get them to approve it they can put anything you want or leave out anything you want to but if you get them as a general statement this is what we're going to do like we put in everything we don't care what it is and the person that reads it's going to have to use his brains a little bit to decide whether it's hey or not hey that's his problem that's all Again, I would like to thank all the participants and ask you all to join me in closing this with the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever