Service Opportunities

There is a lot happening in our Multi-Districts and Area 22! There are lots of opportunities to participate in helping local groups carry the message to the alcoholic who still suffers by connecting your group to AA as a whole.  

Below is a brief list of ideas for getting involved in the AA general service structure:

  • Attend the next SJCMD meeting (every 2nd Saturday) - come with questions!
  • Stand for GSR or GVR election at your home group - this is how our groups get "plugged in" to AA as a whole
  • Attend the next Area Assembly (see calendar or http://www.area22indiana.org)
  • Serve on a SJCMD committee (CPCC/TF, PI, Corrections, Grapevine, Archives) 
  • Recording Secretary for SJCMD meetings
  • SJCMD Newsletter editor
  • SJCMD Webservant (help maintain and update this site!)
  • SJCMD Treasurer
Talk to your GSR or DCM if you are interested in or have any questions about SJCMD, Area 22 or General Service!

(DCM email addresses located on "Contact Us" page)

Continue to check back often for more updates and announcements!  And remember, Service is the Secret!


CPCC Committee Project for reaching out in cooperation with physicians in our local community (more to come!)


PI Commitee - Public Service Announcements on Transpo buses and local paper.


PI Commitee - Participated in 1st annual St. Joseph County Health fair at the County/City building on 7/31.  Lots of AA information was distributed and questions were answered to many County/City employees who attended.  About 15 members of AA showed up to help with this event.  

Grapevine Committee: Several subscriptions purchased for local organizations who may have direct contact with alcoholics still suffering or new to recovery

Corrections Committee: Big Books and Grapevine subscriptions purchased for SJ county jail; Weekly Meetings going into Men's SJ county jail and Community Re-Entry.

Treatment Committee: Big Books being distributed and Weekly meetings at South Bend Community Re-Entry and Step Workshop at The Upper Room.

This is what carrying the message looks like!  

In a Grapevine article in October 1965, the Responsibility Statement is discussed, and Bill W. expresses his views:

Two major thoughts stood out in the remarks of the many speakers, alcoholic and nonalcoholic, at AA's July Toronto Convention. The first was admiration and gratitude for AA's startling success in sobering up hundreds of thousands of lost-cause drunks. The other was concern that the success which has come to AA over the thirty years since its start in Akron, Ohio in 1935 would not lead us to any complacency about the size of the job still to be done.

The theme of the Convention was: Responsibility. "I am responsible. . .when anyone, anywhere, reaches out for help, I want the hand of AA always to be there. And for that: I am responsible."

AA's co-founder, Bill, in his talk to over 10,000 attending the major sessions of the Convention, stressed the need for cooperation with all who work on the problem of alcoholism, the more than 100 agencies in the United States and Canada alone now engaged in research, alcohol education and rehabilitation.

"Too often, we have deprecated and even derided these projects of our friends just because we do not always see eye to eye with them," Bill said. "We should very seriously ask ourselves how many alcoholics have gone on drinking simply because we have failed to cooperate in good spirit with these many agencies. No alcoholic should go mad or die merely because he did not come straight to AA in the beginning."

 

"The first concern of AA members should be with problem drinkers the movement is still unable to reach," Bill said. He estimated that there are 20 million alcoholics in the world today, five million in the U.S. alone. "Some cannot be reached because they are not hurt enough, others because they are hurt too much," he declared. "Many sufferers have mental and emotional complications that seem to foreclose their chances. Yet it would be conservative to estimate that at any particular time there are four million alcoholics in the world who are able, ready and willing to get well if only they knew how. When we remember that in the 30 years of AA's existence we have reached less than ten per cent of those who might have been willing to approach us, we begin to get an idea of the immensity of our task and of the responsibilities with which we will always be confronted."

There have been two Advisory Actions from the General Service Conference regarding the Declaration of Responsibility since it was introduced.  In 1971, the Conference recommended that:

 
 

The Literature Committee, following the general feeling of the Conference, reaffirm both the spirit and the wording of the “I am Responsible” Declaration from the International Convention held in Toronto in 1965.

 

And in 1977, the Conference recommended that:


The Responsibility Declaration not be changed, as it was made at the 1965 International Convention in Toronto.

Comments