The 12 Concepts for World Service – Concepts Workshop – Part 3 of 3 – Beth D.

all right we ready Karen well hi everybody I'm Beth and I'm an alcoholic and I am a member of the into action group out in Coral Springs and it's very exciting for me to be here today I love the title of this workshop and I did not choose the title Craig chose it we discussed a batch of a whole list of titles, and he called it How It Really Works, a 12 Concepts Workshop. And I really love that because what I'm really going to be talking about is how it really all works together, how the whole structure, this whole structure of Alcoholics Anonymous all fits together in one neat little package. And so we're going to talk about the concepts, and I'm not an expert on the concepts but I'm going to share with you some of the things that I've learned about them from some amazingly intelligent individuals. And I've listened to a lot of CDs on the concepts. I've done some reading on the concept and I listen, I go to workshops on the context when I can. And so you know there's nothing that I'm going to be telling you that secret. Anything that I know you probably know and I know there are people in this room who know more than I know and that's a little daunting for me, but that's okay. What I'm interested in doing is hoping that you will leave here today saying to whoever you walk out the door with, wow, that was really neat. I love the way this all works. And if you have that awareness and that feeling when you leave here, I will feel that I have accomplished an awful lot. So, you know, reading the concepts can be very daunting. When I was brand new in general service, we had some concepts workshops at our quarterlies, and they were put on by a past delegate named Chico. Some of you might know Chico, he doesn't participate too much, but he is still around right now, and he was wonderful and I sat in these workshops I sat on the edge of my seat literally with my mouth hanging open and I didn't understand a thing he said but somehow I knew that there was magic in the things that he was talking about he talked about how the 12 concepts which appear, the writing of the 12 concept appears in our service manual if you buy this book you get two books for the price of one. It's really a bargain. You get our AA service manual, and in the back of it, you get the 12 concepts for world service, and they were written by Bill. They have Bill's name on them. Very little of our literature has anyone's name on it. This says, By Bill W. The big book doesn't say, By Bill W., and the 12 and 12 doesn't say, Buy Bill W, even though Bill wrote an awful lot of that material, but this actually says, by Bill W. It has his authorship there. And Chico said that this was the best writing that Bill had ever done. Well, I got the book out and I will tell you, if you have problems sleeping, get The Twelve Concepts because it will put you to sleep in a minute. At least it did so for me. But as I have grown in recovery and listened to more people share, I have come to understand the importance and the significance of the concepts. And I hope that I'll be able to pass some of that on to you today. The concepts embody the administrative, the legal, and the spiritual principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. And you have to take them in context. It's necessary to understand the service structure of Alcoholic Anonymous in order for them to make sense. So the reason the concepts seem to be more difficult to understand than the steps or than the traditions is because they can't be studied in isolation. We have to understand the background before we can discuss the concept. So let's go back to 1935. June 10, 1935, a miracle occurred. One drunk was able to share his experience and his strength and his hope with another drunk, and together the two of them were able to stay sober. And that was a miracle. Up to that point, there was nothing for alcoholics. Alcoholics were considered doomed, and physicians really didn't want to have anything to do with us because they knew that they didn't have a solution for us. So in 1935, something miraculous started. By the spring of 1937, and I'm not going to go into too much of the detail of the early history because we don't have the time, but by the spring of 1937, they counted noses and they realized that there were 40 sober drunks. And now of these 40 sober drunk, many of them had only been sober for a very short period of time. 37, Bill didn't get sober until the end of 34. So Bill had the most sobriety at this time, and he only had less than three years. Imagine one person with less than 3 years and the rest of the people with considerably less time, some of them with just a week or a month or two of sobriete, making decisions about what they were going to do to carry this message to the rest the world. Bill had grandiose plans. He had a Big ego, and he was a visionary, but he also had these huge ideas. And thank goodness that he did. He was a power driver, and it's good that he was the power driver. If he hadn't had that personality, I'm convinced that none of us would be here today because of all the obstacles that they encountered so many times in our early history. But the drunks thought, oh my gosh, we have an answer for alcoholism, and they decided that they needed to spread this word. How were they going to spread it? Well, they decided they needed a book because they wanted to put our message in writing so it didn't get changed. They needed hospitals because hospitals didn't want anything to do with alcoholics in those days. And they also needed, they decide, missionaries. Well, these missionaries would have to be giving up their own work, their own jobs to be carrying this message, so they needed paid missionaries. They voted, and they voted to go for the whole package. Thank goodness that they didn't have the facility to go through with the whole packet or again we probably wouldn't be here today. But what happened was Bill needed to find a way to finance all these projects. So he had a great idea. He decided to put together a charitable trust so that wealthy people, all the wealthy people that he planned to contact would donate to us because wealthy people don't just donate money unless they get something for it. And if he created a charitable trust then the wealthy People could get a tax break. And he figured that if he was giving them a tax break then they'd be willing to contribute their funds to us. So he created a trust that he called the Alcoholic Foundation. Now Bill was a wordsmith. He was brilliant with words, and he called it a foundation rather than a trust because he thought that the word trust sounded a little too paternalistic. And he called the board members trustees rather than directors because he already knew that alcoholics didn't take direction easily. So the Alcoholic Foundation was just designed to hold our assets, which we didn't have yet, But they were going to be able to be responsible for our financial assets. And they were gonna run our office. At the beginning, we had a little office in New Jersey. It actually wasn't our office, it was the office of a member, Hank P., who was a cohort of Bills and worked very hard with Bill to get this whole thing started. It was in New jersey, and we had one secretary. Her name was Ruth Hawk. She was a non-alcoholic. She worked for us. mostly she worked for no money because we didn't have any money to pay her. And out of the goodness of her heart, I don't know why she stuck with us, but she did throughout the whole writing of the big book. They paid her with these stock certificates that Hank had drawn up. He went over to a stationery store and he bought these blank stock certificates. I don' t know if you can go to Office Depot today and buy blank stock certificate, but in those days you could. And he took this pad of blank stock certificates, and he wrote on it, Works Publishing Company. It was never officially a stock corporation. He never registered it or anything, but he was selling these stock certificates. And, well, we'll get into that in a little bit. But Bill created this alcoholic foundation, and he decided that the majority of the trustees of the foundation would be non-alcoholics. And that was because we didn't trust ourselves, and we certainly, if we didn' t trust ourselves certainly wealthy people weren't going to trust us. The first alcoholic foundation was made up, the first board was made of five trustees. Three of them were non-alcoholic and two were alcoholic. The plan didn't work very well. We didn't have any money because wealthy people even though we were willing to give them a a tax break, still weren't too excited about our plan. And I guess they decided that organizations like the Red Cross really were more valuable for them to contribute their money to. So we really ended up with no money. In the spring of 1939, The Big Book was published. The Big Books sold initially for $3.50. Incidentally, it came with a money-back guarantee. Now, one of my sponsees did some research, and she found out that in 2011, $3.50 then was equal to $42 today. Now, I don't know about you, but I don' t have very many books in my library that I spent $42 on. So mostly the books were purchased by professionals, by physicians and by therapists because the average drunk couldn' t afford to buy it. 1940 to 42 we began to get some publicity and our membership began to skyrocket. In 1939, I said that when the book was published, the book says that we are 100 men and women. I understand that that was a stretch a little bit. Some people have said there were maybe about 80 sober people, some of those sober two days. So they were kind of stretching it a littlebit. By late 1941, we had 8,000 members. So we really did skyrocket. And it was the result of wonderful publicity that we got from non-alcoholics. Publicity in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which was a newspaper, which is still the primary newspaper in Cleveland. We got favorable publicity in Liberty Magazine, which has a Canadian publication. And then, of course, Jack Alexander's article about Alcoholics Anonymous in the Saturday Evening Post was the thing that really turned the tide for us. Because in those days, the Saturday evening post was the magazine that every person in the United States had on their coffee table. It was just a huge, huge number of people read that magazine. That was the Magazine that had all the Norman Rockwell pictures on the cover. you probably remember, and as a matter of fact, the issue that had the article about Alcoholics Anonymous had a Norman Rockwell picture on the cover, which is really cool. Recently we had a Norman Rockwall exhibit here in Fort Lauderdale, and I went to the Fort Laudedale Museum and I got to see the original copy of that magazine, which was pretty cool. But Bill knew that we needed our own book, and Bill realized that we needed to own our own book. Remember, they had sold these stock certificates, and so what he did was he gathered up all of the stock certificates and he turned them over to the Alcoholic Foundation. Incidentally enough, every person who had purchased a stock certificate, turned them over to Bill voluntarily and did not request any money for them. The stock certificates had sold for $25. Most of the drunks couldn't afford $25, they paid $5 down and $5 a week until they actually owned the certificate but they were all turned back to Bill and Bill turned them to the Alcoholic Foundation so now we We had some assets for the Alcoholic Foundation to take care of. Bill began to look at this whole thing, and he realized that we needed some guidelines. So in 1946, he wrote a series of articles in the Grapevine magazine. The Grapepine is our meeting in print. And the articles were called Alcoholics Anonymous Tradition of Relations, 12 Points to Assure Our Future. And he published the long form of the traditions, and each month there was an article about a tradition, starting with Tradition 1 and going through Tradition 12. The traditions were published initially in the long forum. Some of you may not even know that there is a long form of the traditions. It's really an interesting misnomer because one of the long forms is shorter than the short form, but that's another story. But the traditions were not well received. When Bill started to present these traditions, people did not want to hear about them. We're doing fine the way we are, Bill. Leave us alone. We don't need those traditions. They're just going to control us. We don't want to be controlled, and people would call Bill, and they would say, Bill, we'd like you to come to our group is having an anniversary. We'd like for you to tell your story. We want to hear about how you hid those bottles in the commode, but for God's sake, don't talk about those damn traditions, and that was the feeling. Fortunately, we got past that, but in 1948, Bill began to look at the Alcoholic Foundation, and he realized that most of the fellowship had no idea who the trustees were, and what's more, they didn't care. Everybody was doing just fine. Bill wrote a pamphlet, and it was titled AA Foundation, Past, Present, and Future, in which he proposed a conference, and he said the conference would be made up of elected representatives from AAs all over the United States and Canada who could take a look at what the foundation was doing and see how our money was being spent and learn about the growth of AA and make suggestions to the trustees. And the conference members, he felt, would provide a link and allow communication between the fellowship, the members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the board of trustees. Each group would have one vote through their general service representative and the groups in a geographic area would elect one delegate who would represent those groups at this conference that he was proposing. The delegates would serve for two years, and half of the delegates would begin in an odd-numbered year and half in an even-numberd year, so the conference would always have some experienced members and some new members. Again, the proposal was not well received. As a matter of fact, there was so much resistance to it that Henrietta Seiberling, who a lot of you have heard her name, she's the one who introduced Bill and Bob. Their first meeting took place at her home in Akron. She started a group called the Orthodox Group, and they wrote an open letter which they mailed to every AA, and in it they said that Bill was suffering from greed and delusions of grandeur. And many people believed that the conference would become a political entity, and it would become authoritarian. It could dominate AA. People feel that it would create a central government in New York, and that the central government would eventually accumulate large amounts of money. And this was exactly what we were trying to avoid. Even Dr. Bob was opposed to the conference initially. He thought it would be complicated and political. But in 1949, an event occurred which changed the tide. Dr. Bob became terminally ill. And that must have shaken everybody because everybody up to this point had been looking to Bill and Bob for guidance and direction. and suddenly it appeared that our founders were not immortal. And Bill realized he began to face his own mortality, and the fellowship realized that Bill and Bob would not be around forever. So in July of 1950, the first international convention was held in Cleveland, and at that point, the 12 traditions were accepted by the 3,000 attendees, and it was an acclamation, a voice vote of acclamation. And you can just imagine what it felt like in that auditorium with 3,000 people all saying that they approved the acceptance of these 12 traditions. I wish I could have been there. It must have been a very emotional experience. At Bill's last meeting with Bob, whose motto we all know was keep it simple, they discussed the conference. Bill traveled, this is after the first international, Bill traveled out to Akron to meet with Bob and he of course didn't know that this would be his very last meeting with Bob although he knew that Bob was terminally ill but Bill was convinced that the simplification that we had lived with in our adolescence wouldn't work as we moved into maturity and that it would create more problems And Bob agreed to give the conference a shot, and they embarked on a five-year trial period. So the first general service conference was held in 1951. That was panel one, although they didn't even use panel numbers at that time. I talked to a past delegate who served quite a number of years later, and he said even when he was serving, they didn'T use panel members. Today we use panel numbers, and we are up to panel 61 this year. So panel one was held in 1951, and the theme, every conference has had a theme, and I love the theme that they chose for this conference. It was not to govern but to serve because, remember, the fellowship was so concerned about us creating a government, and they didn't want that. So I just think that the title for that first conference was really fortuitous. In 1955, the conference's five-year trial period ended, and the conference was deemed a success, and it was made permanent again by acclamation of the attendees at the second international convention in St. Louis. And at this point, the fellowship agreed to turn the responsibility of running AA over to the groups through their elected representatives. So AA was no longer in the hands of the founders. It was in the heads of all the members of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I want to read to you something that Bill said at that time, and this comes from A.A. Comes of Age, which is one of our books that has a wonderful history of the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous, and it's just wonderful. And he says, standing before the convention for the last time, I felt as all parents do when sons and daughters must begin to make their own decisions and live their own lives. No more would I act for, decide for, or protect Alcoholics Anonymous. I saw that well-meaning parents who cling to their authority and overstay their time can do much damage. We old timers must never do this to the AA family. When in the future they might ask us, we would gladly help them in the pinches, but that would be all. This new relationship was indeed the central meaning of what had just taken place. As I spoke, I again felt the tug of that desire to set back the clock, and for a moment I dreaded the coming change as much as anyone. But this mood quickly passed, and I knew that all worry and concern as a parent was now at an end. The conscience of Alcoholics Anonymous was moved by the guidance of God and the guidance of God could be depended upon to ensure AA's future. Clearly my job henceforth was to let go and let God. Alcoholics anonymous was at last safe even from me. I just love that. I just think it's wonderful I get those God bumps when every time that I read that so the conference has no legal authority however historically the Board of Trustees has always followed the conference's recommendations and coincidentally those recommendations that the conference makes are called advisory actions in other words the conference gives advice because the conference isn't a legal entity. So the conference began meeting, it was from 1951 to 1955. It had a trial period and then it became a permanent fixture. By 1959, Bill was concerned that AA was becoming so large that we needed more guidelines. Remember, the conference is a traditional entity. It's run on tradition. In other words, how things are traditionally done And it's dictated by the 12 traditions. The Board of Trustees, what we now call the General Service Board, is a legal entity. It's run according to the laws of the state of New York where it's chartered. So the Grapevine Board owns two corporations. One is Alcoholics Anonymous World Service. We refer to that as AAWS. That's our publishing entity. And the other corporation is the AA Grapevine. That's our magazine, our meeting in print. And the General Service Board appoints directors of these corporations. So Bill had to find a way to blend the traditional with the legal. And he began to write the spiritual lessons that he'd learned during AA's first 25 years. AA was 25 years at this point. And he dictated them to his then-Secretary Nell Wing, who wrote them out in longhand. She was, by the way, a wonderful lady and really a non-alcoholic but just so dedicated to Alcoholics Anonymous. And I was privileged to have the opportunity to know Nell Wing and she was quite a wonderful Lady. So he called this document that he wrote The Twelve Concepts for World Service and it was published in 1962. Now, the 12 concepts are a group of spiritual principles based on the 12 steps and the 12 traditions. In 1943, we have to go back a little bit, the IRS made us a tax-exempt, not-for-profit entity. And one of the reasons that Bill wrote these concepts was to codify how we operate because the IRS is always asking, well, how do you operate? How do you get your money? What do you do with your money if you want to be not- for-profit? You have to demonstrate that you really, truly are not-for-profit. And that was one of the motivations that Bill had for writing these concepts. So the concepts codified how we operate and some of them, it was discovered in 1982, this is kind of interesting, that some of the materials in the 12 concepts, although not the concepts themselves, had been changed and an ad hoc committee was created to find out not who changed them but what was changed and to ensure that the wording of the concepts clearly defines how we operate. So in 1984 the Board of Trustees amended the bylaws of the General Service Board to insert the short form of the 12 Concepts for World Service World Service, and that made the concepts a little more understandable to the fellowship, although they're still a little bit challenging to understand. And we're going to get to them in a minute, and I'm going to give you copies of them, so don't worry. You don't have to remember them. We're goingto give you a copy of them so that you can have them in front of you. So the General Service Board made these concepts, made the General Services Board directly responsible that the spirit of the concepts would not be violated. That was really important. Now the concepts fall into the same category as the steps and the traditions and they can't be changed easily. And we'll get into that a little bit later when we talk about the concepts specifically, but the concepts represent the best summation that Bill was able to devise to describe our fellowship. And he hoped that these concepts would be a reliable working guide. Those are his words. The concepts delineate those important traditions and customs and relations and legal arrangements that allow the General Service Board to work in harmony with all the committees and with its corporations, the publishing entity, AAWS, and the grapevine. And the concepts can be used effectively in any spiritual entity in Alcoholics Anonymous. They can easily be adapted to groups and intergroup and districts and areas and central offices. And one of the underlying principles is that no one is set in unqualified authority over anyone else. We're all equals, and we know that when we go to our groups. We know that we're all equal. It's really interesting when a newcomer comes into a group and says, who's in charge? Well, John is chairing tonight, but he's just filling in for the night, and Linda's our secretary, but she rotates out next month. So who's incharge? We're al incharged, right? The members of Alcoholics Anonymous, we're all equals. We're all just members of alcoholics anonymous and all positions in alcoholics anonymous have a finite term of office, even coffee maker. So let's put it all together. The 12 concepts are all about how the various entities which make up AA relate to each other and the conference service structure provides the vehicle which allows this all to function effectively with a minimum of conflict. Okay, now we've talked about how the AA concepts and the AA World Service structure came about but before we look at the individual concepts, let's look at an example of how it really works. Let's suppose that your group decides to serve ice cream at its meeting because it feels that that would increase the fellowship after the meeting. They had ice cream available. Okay, so the group notices the following. They notice that there's an increased attendance, that there is increased membership in the group, there's increase in the number of people staying afterwards for fellowship, more people are staying sober, more people participating in service, more people doing the steps, there's increased sale of literature. So at their group business meeting somebody says, wouldn't it be great if all meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous served ice cream? So the group GSR brings the statistics that this group has gathered about the increases in sobriety and membership to the district. And the district said, oh, that's a pretty – that sounds good. Maybe we should bring that to the area. So the Group brings this suggestion to the Area. And the area votes to ask the delegate to submit an agenda item requiring all AA groups to serve ice cream. Okay? The suggestion is reviewed by the Board of Trustees, and it's placed on the final agenda of the General Service Conference. The statistics, all the statistics that the group gathered, and all the background material are sent to all the members of the General Service Conference. So they all see what happened in this, in your group where you started to serve ice cream. So the conference committee, I don't know which committee this would be assigned to. That's a little hard to decide. But one of the conference committees would discuss this conference agenda item and they would make recommendations. And if the committee recommends the item, go forward, then they put it on the conference floor and the entire conference will discuss this item. Sometimes for 20 minutes, sometimes for three or four hours or more. Now any conference member may amend the motion so for example someone may stand up and say I'd like to amend the notion to state that we serve chocolate and vanilla ice cream at all meetings. Some people are allergic to chocolate if we just serve chocolate that wouldn't work so let's serve chocolate and vanilla. And the entire conference votes on the amendment, then they vote on the original motion. And if the motion passes by a two-thirds majority, then it becomes a conference advisory action. If it doesn't receive a two thirds majority, it's defeated. But even after it passes, the chairperson will then ask for a minority opinion. And anyone who voted on the losing side may give a minority opinion. For example, one person may stand up and say, well, my group meets at 630 in the morning. We want to serve cookies instead of ice cream. And they don't feel they should have to serve ice cream at that hour. That doesn't make a lot of sense. Another group says, well we've got some members who were diabetics and we think that the that we should be serving sugar-free ice cream as well as regular ice cream. Another member points out that each group was autonomous and and that she should be able to serve whatever flavor her group wants. The chair then asked for a motion to reconsider and any person who voted on the winning side of the vote and has changed his or her mind, because of the information presented in the minority opinion, may make a motion to reconsider. So if the motion receives a simple majority, then the vote on the original motion is taken all over again and there may be considerably more discussion on this motion and then if the item receives a two-thirds majority, it passes. Again, if it doesn't receive two-thirds majority it fails so if the item passes it becomes a conference advisory action and it's published in the final report and it also might be included in the revised edition of the service manual now this is the service manual this happens to be an older last year's model there is a new one out each year they the we've really come up in the world and these books are now color-coded and so I forget what color the 2011 oh there it is there it is take a look at it over there it's a kind of a gold color with blue printing I like the purple with silver but oh well you have to go with this go with the flow so however even if this becomes a conference advisory action and the The conference is suggesting, and remember, everything in alcoholics is just suggested. So the conference is suggestion that all groups serve ice cream. Maybe the amendments pass to serve chocolate and vanilla or to serve whatever flavor the group wants or to service cookies if the group meets before 2 in the afternoon or whatever. But the word goes out to all the groups in the United States and Canada that you should start serving ice cream at your meeting. However, the identical item may come up the following year because no conference action is binding on any other conference. And so after a year's experience, people might write to the Board of Trustees and say, hey, this sounded like a good idea when you first proposed it, but, you know, the ice cream melts. We don't have any place to keep it cold, and it's really creating a mess. The places where we're meeting don't want us to meet there anymore because we're leaving, you know, bowls of ice cream in the garbage and it's attracting ants. And so the whole thing, the whole discussion could take place the next year. That may seem like a little bit of a ridiculous scenario, but when you think about it, it embodies the whole process of how an item becomes a conference agenda item. So now what we're going to do is we're gonna go into each of the 12 concepts individually. And we're going to see how they all define the way Alcoholics Anonymous really works, the title of our workshop. I found a way of looking at the concepts which makes sense to me. And I'm going to share this with you. And in my attempt, I believe that I'm going to be able to make them a little more palatable for you. And we'RE not going to take them in the traditional order, one, two, three, and so on, because I believe it makes it easier to understand them if you look at them a little differently. So I'm going to ask Craig and maybe a couple of other people to help Craig pass out copies of the short form of the tradition so that you'll have them in front of you. And I'm not going to read the, I'm sorry, short formof the concepts. I'm not goingto read them to you because you're going to have themin front ofyou. And if we don't have enough copies, you can look on. But I think we have about enough copies for most of the people in this room. So let's ask the question to begin with, who has the final responsibility and ultimate authority that was derived from our founders, Bill and Bob, in 1955? And concept one says that the final responsibility should always reside with the fellowship. You have a copy of it in front of you, so you don't have to, I'm not going to read the whole thing, but the AA members, the fellowship, you, all of you sitting in this room, have the final responsibility and authority to preserve AA. It's your responsibility. The collective conscience that we talk about in this concept is the same group conscience that we hear about in Tradition II. The fellowship has the final responsibility and authority, which was turned over by the founders in 1955. And so you, as members of a group of Alcoholics Anonymous are responsible for the whole of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, let's look at how we can apply concept one. The members of the group are responsible for preserving AA and ensuring that the group does everything in its power to do so, to preserve AlcoholicsAnonymous. And if a group starts to veer off track, the individual AA Remember, you and me, we have a personal responsibility to do everything in our power to bring it back. For example, if a group discussion starts to center around problems other than alcohol or a district isn't practicing the spirit of rotation or an area is spending money on promotion rather than attraction, We have the responsibility of standing up and speaking our mind and explaining that we feel that this isn't appropriate. It takes courage to stand up and defend the program of Alcoholics Anonymous in a home group or a district or an area meeting, but we each must exercise that courage, and that is really very important. Think about how scared you were when you went to your first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. How scared you are. You didn't even want to say your name. But now that you've been sober for a while, you need to be willing to summon up the courage to do whatever it takes to defend Alcoholics anonymous. If AA ever fails, that failure won't start with the Board of Trustees or the General Service Conference. It will start with individual members of AA who are unwilling to defend our program as it is written in the steps and the traditions and the concepts. I mean what are other people going to think of me when I stand up and say something that's not popular. And yet I have to have the courage to do that. Remember, our entire fellowship, entire fellowship every one of us assumed this responsibility and it is a big one in 1955 when we accepted those 12 traditions in St. Louis. And it's easy to see how the, excuse me, in 1951 when we accepted the traditions in St. Louis, and in 1955 when we excepted this service structure at the Second International. So it's easy to see how the traditions and the concepts are interrelated right here in Concept 1. Currently, there are about 1.5 million AA members who belong to about 60,000 groups in the United States and Canada, and my numbers could be off. I'm not good with numbers, and if anybody has better information, please share it with me after the meeting. Those 1.5 million members can't possibly all get together to create the world services that we need. We need a coordinated public relations policy. We need literature. Our big book is now in about 58 languages. We needs a financial policy. 1.5 million people can't possibly get together to make all this come about so how do the members you and me delegate our authority and who do we delegate it to we delegate it to the delegate okay and concept two talks about the general service conference and you can read it for yourself you have it in front of you In concept two, the fellowship has designated the conference to be its voice through its elected representatives. And the collective conscience, which we saw in concept one, works through the general service conference. Bill and Bob couldn't transfer their authority to the board of trustees, okay? They were individuals who didn't even know, who the fellowship didn't Even know. And if Bill and Bob gave everything to the trustees, the fellowship would have been out of the loop. And they couldn't turn their authority and responsibility over to the groups because that would have been unwieldy. There were groups spreading out all over the United States and Canada by the 1950s. So they had to find a way to find an area where they could turn it over to. To find a smaller segment of the fellowship that they could turn it over to. And that smaller segment is the General Service Conference, which we know is composed of representatives elected by representatives of the groups. So at the group level, there may be need for guidance or a steering committee, particularly if the group is very large and has many meetings. This sort of situation exists in many groups around the country. Some very large groups, I can think of a group out near me, has many, many meetings every day. They meet seven days a week. They choose not to have a steering committee and at that group all the entire membership is invited to participate in a monthly meeting but some groups decide that there are just too many members of the group and that it's unwieldy and they decide to have a steering committee. And that steering committee may make decisions that need to be made in between group business meetings, but the group membership still attends a monthly business meeting, and at that meeting they're able to hear about what the steering committee's decisions are, and if the members disagree with those decisions, they can do several things. First, they can overturn the decisions, or else they can elect an entirely new steering committee now I've seen some entities where the AA members just rubber stamp the decisions that the steering committees make and they don't even want to be bothered to be informed they just let the steering committee make all the decisions and they aren't willing to participate in the decision making process and this doesn't work and you can easily see why at the district intergroup and area level, this concept makes the body of elected representatives the effective conscience of that entity. So here in District 9, which is Broward County, the GSRs who represent your groups and the DCMs who represent the GSRS form the effective group conscience. So again, you can see how Tradition 2 operates in this concept. On district matters, the district committee is the group conscience. At the area level, the area committee does the same thing. Can you see how the concept applies to you and your groups and your district and your area? Is it beginning to make sense and fall into place? Great. The General Service Conference conference operates exactly the same way. The area sends their elected representatives, the delegates to the conference and they share, the area shares with the delegates how they feel about the many issues that are going to be discussed at the conference so if we had seen that agenda item about serving ice cream at meetings in April at our general service we call them quarterlies at our general service quarterly it's a weekend event where all the gsrs and dcms get together we would have told our delegate how we feel about this idea of serving ice cream and one one group might have said we think it's terrible idea another group might have say we think its a great idea another a group might've asked the delegate to make an amendment that they serve that sugar-free ice cream that we talked about but all the members are represented all the Members of AA are represented you're all represented through your GSRs your general service representatives and through your district committee members and it's really important that you know who those people are and it is really important that your group have one there are many groups that don't have a general service representative Either they don't have one because they decide that they don t really want to participate, which is really unfortunate, or they don�t have one, because there's no one in their group who is willing to participate and that's unfortunate as well. So the conference only meets once a year for one week. It's really a week-long business meeting and believe me it is a week long business meeting. The conference meetings start early in the morning. We start with breakfast. We all eat together where we're discussing what's happening. Our meetings start at 9 o'clock, and they go sometimes until 9 or 10 or 11 o' clock at night. We eat all of our meals together. We spend all of out time together, and there are brief coffee breaks and brief opportunities to get up and use the facilities, but other than that, we're in meetings the whole time. When you send your delegate and you hear that your delegate is going to New York, your delegate is not going to go to Broadway shows. The person who gets to go to the Broadway shows is the guest of the delegate, and that is the best thing to be. So if you ever want a great position, volunteer to be the guest of a delegate. So the conference only meets once a year for a week. So how can you run a worldwide service organization meeting only once a year. You can't if you only meet once a year. Can't possibly run a worldwide organization that well so what we do is we elect a board of directors. Remember we said we called them trustees and we call the board the general service board and we allow the board of trustees to function in that capacity but the board only meets four times a year so we'll see how we get around this challenge a little bit later. I want to talk about Concept 6 and 7, so you'll have to jump on your list down to Concept 6 because 6 and 6 describe the relationships between the conference and the board of trustees, and obviously the conference delegates to the board much of the world services operation. So Concept 6 says that the principal responsibility for the maintenance of our world services, and here's an important word, the active responsibility should be exercised by the Board of Trustees. In other words, this concept describes how we get things done in AA. The conference is made up of approximately 131 members, and it sets general policy. And then the Board Of Trustees, there are 21 members on that board, they decide how the policy will be accomplished, and then the directors of our two corporations, AAWS, our publishing corporation, and the AA Grapevine, the directors of those two corporations. Those are trustees or non-trustee directors appointed by the trustees, or maybe they're paid staff members who are hired by the trustees, all those people, they make sure that the work gets done. The service structure represents a large corporation in which the AA groups are the stockholders and the delegates are their representatives who participate at the annual meeting. If you have owned any stock, you probably get letters in the mail once in a while asking for your proxy because somebody wants to go to that annual meeting and vote in your stead. And they want to hear what the board of your stock corporation is doing and how they're handling things. So you can kind of understand a little bit how this all works. Now, why should we give the trustees all this responsibility? Simply because we hold them, the board of Trustees, the General Service Board, we hold them responsible for many of our services. AA has a large annual budget. But you have to remember where that money comes from. The money that pays for our services, much of it comes directly from the basket that you and I pass at our meetings. And so we're really passionate about how this money is spent. The rest of our money, by the way, comes from the profit that we make from publishing and there has been a lot of controversy over the years about whether we should use, take money from the publishing of our literature and use it to support our services. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all of the services that Alcoholics Anonymous provides could be paid for solely by the contributions of members of Alcoholics Anonymous. That isn't the case so far, but hopefully someday it will be. And you know, we are limited in the amount of money we can contribute to AlcoholicsAnonymous. I mean, you could probably put as much as you want in the basket, but if you send a check to AlcoholicAnonymous, I believe that the limit now is $3,000. It used to be 1,000, then they increased it to 2, and then $3. If you send the check to AlcoholixAnonymous for $5,000 they will return it to you. That's unheard of in the corporate world, just unheard of. And the fact that we do this and the fact that we are self-supporting through our own contributions is one of the things that has given us such wonderful publicity because the non-AAs who see what's happening in AA are really our best benefactors because they see what an incredible job we are doing of sticking to our principles, following these principles and not allowing money and property and prestige, the things we talk about all the time in Alcoholics Anonymous, to divert us. And we get a tremendous amount of publicity from well-wishers who are not alcoholics. So the Board of Trustees is responsible for handling our money, and that's something that's very important, and our trustees are also responsible for our worldwide public relations policies and our world affairs. Maybe you've heard it said that the GSR is the guardian of our traditions? Well, the trustees are the active guardians of our 12 traditions. Remember that word, active, appeared in this concept. Many intergroups have steering committees, and these steering committees function pretty much like the board of trustees they handle many of the day-to-day concerns of the intergroup and then they report to the inter group reps and at the monthly intergroup meeting so the steering committee of intergroup needs to have the authority to handle things that come up in between intergroup meetings but they should not bypass the local intergroup representatives and this is something that used to happen right here in Broward County where the steering committee made almost all of the decisions and it was many years ago and this does not happen now and I'm very happy that it doesn't but used to be that the intergroup meeting was so short that if you blinked you missed it it took me longer to drive to the inter group meeting years ago when I was an intergroup representative than it took to sit in on the intergroup meeting. But today, I'm happy to say that in Broward County, our intergroup functions extremely effectively and our inter group representatives have a very important part to play in how the inter group in Brower County functions. And it's really very, very wonderful. So now how did the conference and the board of trustees share these duties? Remember I said concept six and seven talk about how this all works together. It says, Concept 7 answers this question. Originally the board of trustees was set up because we needed to have a legal entity, remember? We needed to have a charitable trust to own our book and conduct our business. And there are a tremendous number of checks and balances. The trustees are the directors of a holding company and And the General Service Board, which controls the subsidiaries, the subsidiary of those two corporations I talked about, the publishing company and The Grapevine, okay, the General Service Board controls those subsidiaries. And the subsidiars in turn carry out the world's services. Now remember, the general service board is a legal entity. It operates under bylaws and articles of incorporation. It has to. It had to be incorporated, and it's incorporated in the state of New York. So those bylaws and those articles of incorporation are legal instruments. And the Board of Trustees has legal control over AA's funds and services. But the conference, remember, is a traditional entity. It has a charter, but the charter is not a legal document. Interestingly enough, the conference always has the superior power. Now think about this. The conference can overcome the legal rights of the Board of Trustees and completely reorganize the board. Remember, the thing that concerned Bill was who was going to act as a buffer between the AA members and the Board Of Trustees who have all this legal power. And that's the reason that the General Service Conference was born. And it was structured so that the delegates always represent more than two-thirds of the conference. So the conference can fire all the trustees, they can fire all the directors of AAWS and the AA Grapevine Inc., and they can hire all the paid staff members, and they can totally reorganize the entire structure. alcoholics anonymous will always need two things god and money so in the end the entire structure is ultimately dependent on the groups which are made up of aa members remember concept one because they have the power of the purse this really does give the group's ultimate control because by law the board of trustees can only have two sources of income contributions from the members and profit from the sale of literature so theoretically now this is just theoretical mind you i don't want you to go running out and do this theoretically the groups can discontinue sending contributions and they can even begin to print their own literature and the board will have no financial resources. So this concept really describes the balance of power between the board and the conference, and up till now it appears to be thoroughly workable. Originally the trustees selected themselves. They were primarily non-alcoholic. The non- alcoholic trustees are called Class A trustees. The alcoholic trustees are class B trustees. Now, if you have trouble remembering that, you can remember that class A, the As are the amateurs and the Bs are the boozers. And that's a good way to remember it. The conference was originally, the board was originally set up where the majority of the trustees were these non-alcoholics because we didn't trust ourselves. And as a matter of fact, the chairperson of the board originally was an alcoholic. The first chairperson of the Board was an alcoholic and according to Gay Gee, a past trustee who just passed away, the first two chairpersons of the Boards were alcoholics. They both got drunk and that was not a good thing. And so the Board decided that in the future the chairperson had to be a non-alcoholic. Just recently, a few years ago, That decision was overturned, and now an alcoholic can be a member, a chairperson of the board. However, I believe it was primarily done because the situation could occur where there was nobody who was eligible or able to serve as chairperson of the Board. But so far we have never, since that time way back in the beginning, we have ever had a Class B alcoholic trustee as chair person of the Board. And it really works very well to have these non-alcoholics chair our general service board because they are not bound by the tradition of anonymity, and they can break their anonymity at the public level. They can have their names and their pictures published in newspapers and magazines, and they Can be on the news and on television. And so that really works pretty well. So initially the trustees were given the responsibility of selecting their own, selecting the members of the board of trustees. But eventually, once the conference was established, the trustees were given the responsibility of nominating trustees, but the final decision of whether or not a trustee was elected was made by the conference. But the trustees do have a lot of power, and this concept also just contains examples of how the board might have to veto a conference advisory action. For example, if the conference voted something which was not in keeping with the laws of the state of New York where the board's incorporated, the board would have to step in and say, no, we can't do that. Now, the trustees can also spend less than the conference budget if it believes the conference is not being fiscally prudent. I like those words. But they can't spend more. And also, if a situation changes and what seemed appropriate when the conference was meeting suddenly seems inappropriate, then the Board of Trustees is empowered to take the necessary steps to right the situation. Now what happens at your local intergroup that has a steering committee? Does that steering committee have the authority to veto decisions made by the intergroup reps at the meeting? It's something for you to investigate. I don't know the answer to that question, but you might want to find it out. As responsible members of AA, we need to know how our service entities function. That's our responsibility. So the board only meets four times a year. Well, how do we run a worldwide organization when you only meet four times a year? You don't. So, the board has to delegate some of its responsibility. Who do they delegate to? They delegate to the two service corporations, AAWS and the AA Grapevine. And we're going to take a break now and then we're gonna give everybody a chance to have a snack and take a break and then we'll come back and we'll start in with concept eight so you can see