a) Practicing These Principals in All Our “Service Affairs”:

1. What is the difference between "General Service" and "Service in General"?

General Service: Most A.A. Members are primarily interested in their groups, in their own sobriety, and in helping other drunks one-on-one. And that is as it should be. While the work of general service has precisely the same objective -- carrying the message to the alcoholic who still suffers-- the connection is not always direct or obvious. Some stimulators are usually needed to get the attention of A.A. members -- to show them that service can add rich dimension to their sober lives and twelfth step work, and that their participation is vital to the future of A.A.

 Good communication is of vital importance. In personal Twelfth Step work, there is no end to communication. The sponsor talks to the drunk; speakers share their experience; we share with each other. But when it comes to general service work, communication has a tendency to break down. It can take hard work to get the attention of alcoholics, but with a creative approach, they can be encouraged to take time out from the nuts and bolts of recovery to think about another phase of their new lives. Once A.A. members are well informed about service, they often want to become involved and take on their own service responsibilities.

 In many areas, the delegate and area committee members make themselves available to visit groups or district meetings and talk about general service. Workshops on the Traditions, Concepts or other aspects of service are often an effective way of spreading the word of service. Sometimes two or more districts will work together to sponsor a service event.

 Here is the experience of two areas: "We let  committee members be responsible for running sharing sessions in their districts, then reporting on them at the monthly assembly. We created as many jobs as possible for GSR's and committee members and encouraged visitors to our assemblies, so they could see what was being done.

 Video meetings: "Altogether service and informational videos, were showed 239 times at group meetings. There are no records of the hundreds of questions about general service that were answered during that period."

 Service in General is the act of participating in local group/meeting activities serving as group secretary, treasurer, registrar, coffee maker/clean-up, set-up for meetings etc. Service in general is most frequently performed by the group members at the group level and seldom for A.A. as a whole (World wide).

 Here's a good question for someone to embrace and render an opinion. MSCA 09 has in excess of 1,800 group meetings per month. Why does the GSR attendance at monthly assemblies and ASC's only average between 100-200 or 10% per ASC/assembly meeting.

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Practicing A.A.’s Principals – the Pathway to Unity’ 

What are the principals we are talking about here?  Is there a list of them somewhere?  The first thing we should do is find out which principals we are talking about.  The Forward to the 12 & 12 says that “A.A.’s  12 steps are a group of principles, spiritual in their in their nature……”  Oh, I believe that is the correct spelling of Principles, as opposed to principals.  Personally, I don’t think there is any question that if every member of A.A. practiced the 12 steps as a way of life, Unity would be one of the many by-products.  But remembering who our membership is, I think it is always best for me to remember the freeing idea that my first sponsor gave me, “Everybody is pretty much doing the best they can with what they got to work with”.  The only person I can influence in this area is myself. 

The following are presentation/discussion topics for the 2010 General Service Conference:

a) Practicing These Principals in All Our “Service Affairs”:

1. What is the difference between General Service and Service in General?

As Bill outlined in the A.A. Service Manual, an A.A. service is any service that helps us reach the alcoholic who still suffers, from a cup of coffee with a newcomer to the services provided by our General Service Office in New York City.  So, all services are Service, in general.  However, only those services   provided by the General Service structure, whether it be, the District, the Area or the General Service Office fall under the category of General Service.  One last addition to the General Service structure may be the most important General Service provider.  This would be the A.A. Group’s General Service Representative.  This member serves all of A.A. by providing the vital communications link between their Home Group and the rest of A.A. 

2. Love and Tolerance is our code.

Right out of our Big Book comes the direction to remember this simple idea: love and service to others is a code by which we must attempt to live.  A fact of life for me in A.A. is that when I am thinking of others and helping them meet their needs, I simply don’t have enough time to mess the whole thing up by thinking about and getting involved in matters that don’t concern me.  Taking the 4^th and 5^th Tradition together tells me the same thing: there is a lot of stuff that is simply not my business, but my real business is thinking and acting with the welfare of others paramount. 
3. Setting an example – Attraction to Service.
I don’t know anybody who ever stayed in service outside their Home Group, that didn’t stay because there were people who created an attraction to stay.  It is always the people - not the personalities, but the people - who keep people coming back, whether in our Home Groups or in service.  One of our late Past-Delegates defined it best: Attraction, not Distraction.  If I can keep from being distracted by the peripheral noise, I can truly provide my service for fun and for free.  I don’t need to take sides; I don’t need to talk on every issue; I don’t need to indulge in character assassination; I must allow the process we have in place to work its magic.  A.A. has never made a mistake we haven’t been able to go back and correct, so long as we don’t tear each other apart with that erring member, the tongue. 
b) Unity Through Inventory:
One of the great frameworks for inventory is provided in the 13 questions in the A.A. Group pamphlet.  So, what do we do?  Every time we set out to take inventory, we use some member’s idea of what we should be inventorying.  I believe that we should start with the simple inventory questions already provided in a piece of literature created and maintained by all of A.A. – The A.A. Group pamphlet.  On pages 27 and 28 of this marvelous piece of literature are 13 questions that can be very easily modified to address an inventory for anybody within A.A.  Most of the questions don’t even require modification.  Some additional questions could be added to make the inventory more specific to the Area Assembly or Area Service Committee meeting, or the Area structure in general.  Lastly, I believe that the line on page 64 of the Big Book is equally true for A.A. service bodies; “A business that takes no regular inventory usually goes broke”.  Of course, when we talk about broke in this sense, we are talking about spiritual bankruptcy and an absolute inability to work together for the common good of all A.A.
1. Our Common Welfare Should Come First.

Our own experience has shown us over and over again that when we are thinking about the welfare of others, we are much less likely to get side-tracked into personal and divisive issues.  The great gift we are given when we apply the A.A. principles in our lives is that we become much more interested in the welfare of others and of A.A., as a whole.  Always happens, never goes down any other way. 
2. This We Owe to A.A.’s Future.

What do we owe to A.A.’s Future?  A partial answer is found in 1., above: To place our common welfare first; to keep our fellowship united.  This is directly from the A.A. Declaration of Unity.  And what is the payoff for seeking A.A. Unity – if we return to the Declaration of Unity, we are given the answer, “For on A.A. unity depend our lives and the lives of those to come”. 
3. What Happens After Inventory?
Well, we can always look to the 4^th step promises to get an idea, “If we have been thorough about our personal inventory, we have written down a lot.  We have listed and analyzed our resentments.  We have begun to comprehend their futility and fatality.  We have commenced to see their terrible destructiveness.  We have begun to learn tolerance, patience and good will toward all men, even our enemies, for we look at them as sick people.  We have listed the people we have hurt by our conduct, and are willing to straighten out the past if we can”.  So, leaving aside some of the more personal expressions, the promises of the 4^th step could certainly be the goals of an inventory.  But given the nature of our structure in General Service, a General Service inventory should probably have written goals as a product of the inventory, such as proposed modifications to Area Guidelines, and the like.  If an ado committee has been created to foster and administer the inventory process, this committee should provide a report within  an agreed-upon time frame, listing  recommendations to the Area Service Committee and the Area Officer’s Committee for action.  This report should be prominently posted for a reasonable timeframe on the Area website. 
c) General Service Conference Agenda Selection Process:
I would recommend a single change to the General Service Conference Agenda Selection Process:  If an item is time-sensitive, include the item on this year’s General Service Conference agenda, if the item is not time-sensitive, include it on the next year’s agenda.  This would give the fellowship more time to become familiar with and discuss many items on the Conference Agenda.
1. How it Works.

Pass on this one
2. Collective Participation.

Pass on this one
3. Communication – The Key to an Informed Decision.

I heard our Pacific Regional Trustees say at the Regional Forum in Santa Clara in 1994: “Communications is the parent of participation”.  I’ve never forgotten that simple but profound statement.  We always hear about the lack of participation  in service work, any service work, but what is missing is not participation, it is communication.  Outreach to those Groups and Members who don’t participate must be improved.  To this end, we need more and better-informed District Committee Members, (DCM) and District Committee Member Chairs (DCMC).  And we need to give them the informational tools to do their job.  I would like to see the Area website used in a more effective manner for this purpose.  The website should be a source of accurate and readily-available information that the DCM and DCMC can use to supplement their own knowledge and experience.  Until such time as we can improve this condition, we will still have decisions vital to A.A.’s future made by too few people.  Even though those few people making the decisions are hard-working, dedicated and informed, they are still too few.

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