[Businessmtg] Newcomers Topic

[Anne O.]

Good Morning All,

 

Great dialog on this topic!  As Greeter Chair and having been a member of
the Newcomers committee (as well as being nominated as chair of that group!)
I have given this topic a lot of thought beyond this discussion.

 

.         There is a newcomers page already, so fine tuning that with
decisions made by this group may be a good start.  Several hurdles the
newcomers committee grappled with was who is or should be our audience.
Newcomers to ASP or newcomers to Al-Anon, although there is some overlap,
they have different needs.  A single page may not be enough and based on my
experience here and in my professional life, people don't read/can't read
everything.  The newcomers committee was NOT effective, brainstorming
through email just doesn't work.  If, this were to be considered again, it
would need to have complete participation by the members and would need to
have scheduled meetings for anything to be accomplished.  I think there are
better ways to address this topic.

.         The greeters are the first members of ASP that a newcomer comes in
contact with.  The newcomer gets an email from the greeter, signed by the
greeter and with an email address to reply to.  The newcomer also gets a
system generated email when they are subscribed, there they are given
Jerry's contact information.  The newcomer is welcomed to the meeting,
members at that point have welcomed the newcomer by name or in general.
This approach is similar to what I have seen in F2F meetings where a
newcomer is greeted "at the door" and individual members will personally
welcome that newcomer either before or after the meeting.

.         Newcomers meeting:  I am on the fence here.  I only attended one
F2F where newcomers were taken out of the meeting and given a newcomers
welcome/meeting.  It was scripted and a member of the meeting would
volunteer to do this, they then missed their meeting.  You can't tell
someone how to work their recovery, and that is sometimes how I have felt
about that type of meeting.  Other meetings have had a chair decide to do a
Step 1 meeting because a newcomer had joined the group for the evening.  I
found that to be much more effective, all members participate and Step 1 is
the natural lead in to this wonderful program.

 

 

Each newcomer has different needs and personalities.  When I first came to
Al-Anon, I hid in the shadows and watched and listened for a VERY long time
before I participated, if anyone had pushed themselves or this program on me
I would have left.  We need to think carefully about the common good.

 

That's all I have for now.

 

Hugs,

 

Anne