The AAWS Board recently recommended that monthly communication be sent regarding matters related to self-support.

‘We are all going to foot the bill’

I got sober a few days before Christmas in 1986, so I feel especially grateful and
reflective this time of year. I am still awed at how miraculously A.A. has worked in my
life, even before I walked into my first meeting.

I was desperate, but a bit clueless. I saw a classified ad (and I am showing my age!) in
the back of the local paper that said: “Drinking problem? Maybe we can help.” That was
followed by a listing of meeting times and places in my neighborhood. It would take me
a few weeks of white-knuckling it before I went to my first meeting. I was welcomed into
a warm room and offered refreshments. And while someone told me I would never have
to hurt like this from alcohol again, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

But my getaway was slowed by a gauntlet of members who handed me A.A. pamphlets
and meeting books and encouraged me to stay for the second meeting. It took me a few
days to return, but I didn’t drink.

As an alcoholic, self-centered in the extreme, I just came to expect that all this help
would be there for me. It wasn’t until my first business meeting that I realized it was
made possible by the money members were putting in the basket. This was my first of
many lessons over the years in the power and impact of self-support.

Bill W. wrote of the critical importance of self-support to the Fellowship and the special
obligation this tradition asks of members in his October 1967 article “A.A.’s Tradition of
Self-Support,” which is included in the 2025 International Convention commemorative
edition of Language of the Heart.

Every single A.A. service is designed to make more and better Twelfth Step work
possible, whether it be a group meeting place, a central or intergroup office to
arrange hospitalization and sponsorship, or the world service Headquarters to
maintain unity and effectiveness worldwide.
These service agencies are absolutely essential to our continued expansion — to
our survival as a Fellowship. Their costs are a collective obligation that rests
squarely upon all of us. Our support of services actually amounts to a recognition
on our part that A.A. must everywhere function in full strength — and that, under
our Tradition of self-support, we are all going to foot the bill.

We all share this responsibility to ensure that A.A. is there for the next person who
stumbles into our rooms, as it was for us when we needed the gift of recovery. Bill’s
recognition that “we are all going to foot the bill” is both our spiritual responsibility and
our spiritual heritage.

John W.

Class B General Service Trustee and AAWS treasurer

Learn more about group and individual contributions and their impact at aa.org.