Greetings Area 46,
The agenda item we discussed for the General Service Conference was “Review progress report regarding the pamphlet ‘Young People and A.A.’”. This began as an Advisory Action of the 2016 GSC, to revise the pamphlet to better reflect the experiences of young people in A.A. today. The next step is for the revised draft of the pamphlet to be sent to Conference Literature.
Committee. As the draft pamphlet is only available to the committee, we were to review the background including the comments from the YPAA sharing sessions and share our committee’s thoughts. There are obvious limitations to sharing thoughts on a pamphlet draft that we cannot see, but we tried our best. The pamphlet is very long as it is, at about 40 pages. People might be more willing to read a shorter pamphlet. We considered whether any of us read pamphlets as newcomers. Most of us didn’t get sober by reading pamphlets; only one of us read all the pamphlets a very long time ago. One idea that we liked is having a QR code included in the pamphlet that scans to the newer conference-approved “Young and Sober in AA’’ video. We are unanimously in favor of an update to the pamphlet in general.
We discussed several things that our committee has been doing this year. One of them is that the Committee has a monthly traveling Zoom meeting, where participants from all over the state can come together to experience Young People’s meetings in other parts of the world. The second is the planning of a virtual work-shop. This committee has organized an annual Three Legacies Workshop for the past six years. This year, we decided to revamp this workshop. We are still in discussions about potential topics and themes such as barriers to young people in sobriety, never having a legal drink, being sober in school, moving in sobriety, being LGBTQ+ and sober, an “un-traditions” workshop–speakers in a nontraditional world pulling topics from readings or phrases in the Big Book/12×12. And finally, we are com-piling a list of AA members that got sober young, especially those willing to speak at events, for the purpos-es of workshops and future service. If you would like to be on this list, or know someone who should be, please email first name, last initial, contact information, and speaker re-cording to ypaa@dev.aa-nia.org.
YPAA traditionally does a summer event at a park with kickball/games–an AA-athalon. We want to keep that going. It is usually put on by YPAA groups D12 and D13, and we’re not sure if there has been much talk about it yet, but this commit-tee can take on the planning of this event. We discussed that it would be a good idea to charge this commit-tee with the event so it does not get lost in the shuffle when individuals move and such. Planning can start at our monthly Sunday night commit-tee meeting.
We had a few announcements at our committee meeting. One of our YPAA committee members, Caro-line, will be the Friday night speak-er at the Area Convention in June. Andy announced that there will be a Founders Day event in Rio Rancho on June 12th. Eloy brought us a flyer for Tico Time Soberfest, which will take place September 23rd-26th at the new Tico Time River Resort.
Our next meeting is the last Sunday of the month at 7:00pm via Zoom. Meeting ID: 920 6507 8359 Pass-code: YPAA
In love & service,
Lindsay M. (she/her)
Area 46 YPAA Chair