Michael P. (not me), a delegate from Connecticut, wanted to be able to get around town during the convention, so he went on Craigslist and found a bike to buy for $25.
At the end of the week, he sold the book to a hotel clerk for $25.
Nice enough bike, too. I wonder why it went so cheap.
Nine groups were able to send representatives to WSBC all or in part because they received financial support:
* Vancouver Island Intergroup
* Central Maine Intergroup
* Island Intergroup
* OA New Brunswick Intergroup
* Nova Scotia Intergroup
* DDOA-Germany
* Iceland National Service Board
* National Service Board of Poland
* 12 Steps 4 COES Virtual Service Board
A growing mantra of the age is, “You can’t change it if you don’t measure it.”
That maxim underlies the survey OA sent last year to every one of the 5,991 meetings for which it had a valid address. Results showed that OA has about 54,000 members, 41,500 of them in the US. The average meeting has eight or nine regular members.
The survey was undertaken to provide a baseline upon which to judge the effectiveness of the planning goal of increasing OA’s membership at least 20 percent by 2013.
The Saturday collection drew $923.74, for a three-day total of $2825.97 — that’s a creditable average of almost $15 per person. And that’s not including the $1,400-plus that was later taken in support of the new translation fund.
As you know, the fellowship celebrates its 50th anniversary next year with a convention in Los Angeles, where OA was founded.
If you have any ideas on how to mark the milestone, send them to our new trustee, Mary Rose, at trustee@…. or to the world service office. WSO is at work right now on that effort.
One idea I heard at WSBC, from the floor, was “$50 for the 50th,” a fund-raising idea. It wasn’t proposed formally, and I don’t think it would have been the place for it. So far, it’s just something someone said.
The convention will be Aug. 26-29, 2010 at the LAX Hilton. Members can begin making their reservations Sept. 1, but online registration won’t be available until next year. If you want to stay abreast of convention developments, send an e-mail to conventioninfo@oa.org that gives your full name, your state or country, and an e-mail address.
The theme is, “Return Again in 2010: We Are Family.” I wonder what song they’ll be playing at the banquet.
If you go to region or the WSBC as a delegate, part of your time is spent on committee work that continues throughout the period until the next gathering, if not longer. On both levels, I’ve gravitated to public information outreach. Depending on level, other options include literature, twelfth-step within, finance, publications, by-laws, and professional outreach.
As I said previously, I agreed to be co-chair of the WSBC committee this year, backing up Carol B. of Westchester Intergroup in New York. She was returned to the position by acclaim, and if experience is a guide and HP is willing (certainly for her sake but perhaps also for mine), my title will be an trifle and I’ll remain another bozo on the PI bus. She’s both energetic and capable all by herself.
We have three subcommittees for the year:
I got up Thursday morning intending to hit to OA meeting and then meet a San Diegan for breakfast, but neither came to pass.
For reasons I never quite uncovered, I decided upon waking to attend a session on what OA can do for or about youth obesity. Though I definitely learned my obesity in youth, and once or twice even attended a youth-focus meeting in Burlington that has long since folded, I’ve never paid much attention to the plight of kids as a class of overeaters. Still, I went.
Trustee Joe L. (All the trustees used their full names, but in this venue, which falls under “other public media of communication,” I’ve been erring on the side of anonymity) gave a pretty good rundown of efforts that have been expended, and ideas groups might try, but I have to say that I left thinking that there really isn’t much we can do for obese kids.
One reason is the potential for liability. A kid comes to a meeting and starts getting guidance from older strangers? Starts being guided to a Higher Power? Is told to call said strangers — especially one in particular — every day?
A second reason, which didn’t come up during the meeting but is true for me, also relates to HP. I cannot imagine having considered, never mind having embarked on, or having benefited from, a spiritual program of any sort when I was, say, 15, by which time I was already well over 200 pounds. And I had had eight years of religious training, and was recognized one year for missing neither a thrice-weekly class or a Saturday service, so I was exposed to the concepts.
Having said that, here are some of the facts and ideas Joe shared:
* Out of the thousands of meetings registered (my notes say 5,900 one place, 6,400 in another), 11 have a youth focus. And, Joe said, there are actually fewer; a handful had closed when he checked further. Joe suggested that eac intergroups could each try to get one meeting to become more teen-focused, which would have a big effect on the number of teen meetings across the country/world.
* One idea is to have concurrent meetings, similar to a newcomers meeting, so that members get a meeting even if no youths show up.
* Another is to have a teen-option format, to be used if a youth shows up. A meeting could vote to follow the teen format for, say, a few weeks, as long as the teen was coming back. Sharing under such a format might focus on child-eating memories, or the format might ask for sharing to be “teen appropriate.”
* Ask a parent of the teen to attend the meetings with her/his child. Not only would the parent learn a few things, but it would also address most of the liability issues.
* Region conventions could put youth outreach on its agenda, to try to stir up ideas among the fellowship.
* We could do outreach within OA, to try to learn from kids we know (family members, mostly) what might work for their peers.
* On Long Island, they’ve done an “adopt-a-school” effort in which OA members speak to health classes during the addiction portion of the curriculum.
* Telephone meetings might be a good inroad for reaching kids, since logistics such as getting rides can be a bar to a kid’s regular attendance. Online meetings, however, are less good, on child-safety grounds.
This has all been about outreach toward teens, but as is the case throughout recovery, we have a stake in the issues too. Though I have no figures, OA appears to me to skew older, and unless we bring in younger people, we will eventually fade away.
Ask newspapers how the demographics are working for them: Older readers pass away, younger readers go elsewhere, and an industry is in crisis.
…but I’m still writing, for a few more posts, anyway.
I got either to 5 or 6 meetings during my time in Albuquerque, and that was great. Some of them I needed, and some of them I went to anyway; perhaps you can relate.
It is quite a luxury to have meetings just steps away at all times of the day. I never got to a lunch or dinner meeting (meals are allowed), but I either began or ended every day with a meeting. (I think. May have missed one.)
I was chatting with a fellow delegate before one of the sessions, agreeing how cool it is to have so many meeting opportunities, and we started planning a recovery community modeled on the symbiotic industrial park, in which one company’s “trash,” (carbon dioxide, say) is the next company’s raw material. Rents would be determined on level of recovery, so that we would have a steady stream of newcomers, whose rents would rise as they became happier, more stable, and more productive.
OK, so we had only a couple of minutes before the meeting was called to order, and we may (!) have kinks to work out, but, well, we sure agreed that having four meeting options every day, all steps away, was pretty cool.
Here in the 20-something-th post, I report on what was probably the most hotly contested piece of business, Proposal H, which sought to significantly change the definition of abstinence. You can imagine how many people might react strongly to any proposal with that description.
When I saw the original, I sure did, although by the time it had been through the conference mill (two trips to the reference subcommittee, whose job it is to wrangle contentious measures to the ground in a smaller group before coming before the full conference), it added only four new words, and, after all the preliminaries, was dispatched fairly expeditiously.
Here’s what it used to say:
According to the dictionary, the word “abstain” means to refrain from. Abstinence in Overeaters Anonymous is the action of refraining from compulsive eating.
Spiritual, emotional, and physical recovery is the result of living the Overeaters Anonymous Twelve-Step program.
Here’s how it would have been changed:
According to the dictionary, the word “abstain” means to refrain from.Abstinence in Overeaters Anonymous is the action of eating in a manner which satisfies our individual nutritional needs, while refraining fromcompulsive eatingovereating.
Spiritual, emotional, and physical recovery is the result of living the Overeaters Anonymous Twelve-Step program.Abstinence and living the Overeaters Anonymous Twelve-Step program arrests actions that damage us, and support our spiritual, emotional, and physical recovery.
The first time it went to the reference subcommittee, it was reported out with a negative recommendation. Before it could reach the floor, though, it hit with three amendments, which automatically sends it back to the subcommittee. After considerable wrangling, a delegate from Santa Cruz, Calif., hit upon the keep-it-simple solution of merely adding the four words “and compulsive good behaviors” to the end of the original first paragraph, while retaining the original motion’s recision of the dictionary reference.
I would have easily voted against any change that would have changed “compulsive eating” to “overeating.” To my thinking, compulsive eating is the overarching term for what we do, including anorexics and bulimics. I would be much happier if all references to “compulsive overeating” were changed to “compulsive eating,” but that’s not a fight I’m going to precipitate.
In addition to the decision to create a special fund to support the translation efforts, the conference was presented with one other emergency new business motion this morning, to establish a conference committee on the Web and technology.
It passed by a very large margin.
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