[Businessmtg] Group Rep Report - Part 1 - History Lesson

[Steve Rankin]

Hi folks,

One of the hats I’m currently wearing is the Group Representative hat.  I wonder if it looks as good as the cowboy hat I normally wear?  😊

This is Part 1 of my Group Rep report where I will discuss the history of service beyond the group level for our electronic group.  Part 2 will be in a separate post and discuss current events.

ASP is part of District 53 (D53).  Since most of our members are unfamiliar with the Al-Anon service structure, I'll start with a 50,000' view, followed by a quick history of District 53.  

Traditional geographic face-to-face Al-Anon service structure:  The Al-Anon "Headquarters" is the World Service Office (WSO) in Virginia.  WSO serves the United States and Canada; some countries around the world are served by country-wide GSOs (General Service Office).  Each Group can elect a Group Rep (GR) that represents the Group at their District and Area.  Districts tend to follow city and county boundaries.  A District may include several cities or counties in rural areas, while a large city may have several Districts.  The next layer is the Area, which was originally drawn on state lines.  Large, populous states such as NY, TX and CA include multiple Areas.  All together there are 70 Areas in the US & Canada where the GRs elected Delegates to represent the Area at the annual World Service Conference (WSC) in April.  Within the United States & Canada there are 9 Regions (6 in the US and 3 in Canada); Regional Trustees elected by the Delegates and serve on the Board of Directors (BoD).  

Back in late 1995, the BoD decided to classify the online groups as "meetings" instead of "groups" as that would solve the problem of the online groups having GRs and so on up to Delegates that attended the WSC.  This decision was labeled as a 3-year test; however, it was expected to be repeated as necessary.  So, that's what happened from 1995 to 2022 - ASP, like the others was officially a "meeting" without voice, vote or representation in the greater Al-Anon fellowship.  
Then, COVID came along and the world stopped spinning.  Public meetings were shut down, so the members of Al-Anon flocked to the online meetings.  Zoom was around then, but with barely 2M users.   A month later Zoom had over 300M users.  A new paradigm began.  Prior to that, there were roughly 26 Al-Anon meetings online,  that exploded to over 2,000.  The Al-Anon HQ could not longer ignore the electronic meetings, not treat them as something less than official groups.  The Delegates at the 2021 World Service Conference made it official with two group consciences: one to direct WSO that electronic meetings are officially recognized as Al-Anon groups, and two to direct WSO to remove the differences between f2f geographic groups and electronic groups in the Service Manual.  The 2022-2025 edition of the Service Manual is now on Version 4 as a result.  

The formation of the new Global Electronic Area (GEA) began in late 2021 and finalized with the election of GEA officers in early 2022.  It was at that point that the electronic groups began to have their own representation, however the reality was that the new Area existed in name only as there was no internal structure.  Eventually, the GEA made the decisions on districting, dividing the Area into 55 districts of 20 groups each, based primarily on the start time of the group's meeting.  That might work well for groups that start at say 12 Noon, however that doesn't apply to email meetings very well.  One of the GEA conclusions was to "To promote unity and understanding in the GEA, each district where possible will include
a mix of at least two platforms."  So, the GEA lumped about half of the email meetings into one district and half into another, along with some phone meetings in one and other phone meetings the other.  To further complicate matters, the GEA sprinkled a few Spanish-speaking meetings and one French-speaking meeting in our district.    

Love and SERENITY,
Steve