A Dozen Steps

Let’s Keep Talking

by Mark on August 5th, 2006

It is definitely a pleasure to receive such positive feedback as you folks have offered on “How Are A.A. World Services Supported?” Thanks!

I received other, much less positive feedback, this morning on the landline I’m attached to. One of our area group’s members brought the old information to the fore at a “group conscience” meeting and became adamant about it’s authenticity. (Ego… yet, I might have done the same thing two weeks ago)

So, to quote the oldtimer that caught me on my “stuff,” “the telephone is a magnificent invention - they’re all over the place” I am waiting for a response to my message to our State Delegate because he knows the group member. Live in the solution.

dAAve, John and Gwen, I very much appreciate your comments. Now, can you folks clone yourselves so we can divide you up all over AA as a whole?

From dAAve;

“Down here, most people have no idea of the difference between a closed and an open meeting, the difference between a clubhouse and a group, what a GSR does, or most of the Traditions as a whole.”

From John B.;

Relating to his attitude for the first ten years of his sobriety - “Lack of education and a general indifference or apathy to anything that doesn’t affect me directly.”

From Gwen;

Relating to her personal experience with an oldtimer who, for 22 years had become good at “ducking the issue” of making coffee for a meeting.

Do you know what this stirs up in my mind? How could you lol?

Road Trip!!! It’s time for a road trip!!!

And now, from an old salesman, if we boil it down to the ridiculous all it amounts to is this;

If every group in AA were to contribute $136.85 in 2006 it would allow the Fellowship to be fully self-supporting from contributions. (I’ve obtained that info from our State delegate who provided it to me from a copy of the General Service Board’s Treasurers’ report from April 2006.)

Take that one more step. Using the numbers in that report its possible to determine that there are about 54,000 groups in AA. Since only 43% of the groups contributed in 2005, that means about 23,220 groups wound up contributing $232/group.

Summarily, if only 16% more groups had contributed in 2005, we would have met paying our GSO supporting service functions completely 100% with personal/group contributions.

Oddly Enough

There’s another way to look at this - if each AA member contributed $6.14 we would have had the same result. What is odd about that is that means the GSO has our individual membership at about 1.2 million members. For the time I’ve been a happy member I’ve heard our membership is about 2 to 2.5 million members. Using 1.2 million means that each member contributed $4.45/member in 2005. At $4.45/member we needed contributions from a bit shy of 1.7 million members to achieve fully self-supporting.

If you’d like to be really very silly about these figures - at $4.45/member for the year that means that each member is making just over a third of a meeting/month if each of us is contributing $1/meeting.

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POSTED IN: The Twelve Traditions