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Every A.A. group ought to be self-supporting, declining outside contributions.

October 1970

On my first approach to AA, the movement was just ten years old. The Traditions had not yet been written, but already AA had effectively declared itself independent of all handouts, thank you. It was managing, somehow, to pay its own way, and I was very glad to learn that.

If it had turned out to be a government-financed project or a charitable branch of some church, my feelings about it could not have been so instantly warm and comfortable. The fact that it was just us drunks, paying our own way, lessened my shame at having to ask for help.

I did, though, feel embarrassed the first few times the collection hat came my way. I was so ashamed to have not even a dime for it that I might have stayed away if the leader had not made a little speech one night. He said it was perfectly all right for those of us with no dough at present to let the hat pass by, since everyone there understood being broke. Visitors were also asked not to contribute because AA wanted to be self-supporting, he said, and we needed only a little money for our purposes.

Later, as treasurer of a group, I understood more clearly those purposes: paying rent for the meeting room, providing AA literature to carry the message outside the meeting room, and putting coffee into the pot. In addition, we sent a certain percentage monthly to our local central office (intergroup) and another portion to keep the big world central office (the General Service Office) going.

Interlocking with Traditions Seven, Five and Six do suggest that we have no other enterprises to finance, don’t they? The conclusion seems so simple that since then it has always taken me by surprise when financial disagreements hit the fan in AA groups. Yet I have joined my most mature, serene AA friends time after time in acting positively demented over the clubhouse cost of a cup of coffee.

In fact, years ago here in New York, almost all groups had an unspoken rule: Finances were too inflammatory to be mentioned at a regular meeting. I suppose we were afraid we were too immature to stay sober if we took the dangerous risk of mixing talk about, say, the moral inventory with that dirty word “money.”

Instead, before the regular meeting time each group had a separate business meeting, usually monthly (when the moon was full, I guess). Then we could madly and happily screech at each other about bills and cash with no mention of “prayer and meditation’’ or being “restored to sanity’’ to mix us up.

It was as if we were supposed to be safe, protected somehow from getting drunk over financial pettiness, from 7:30 to 8:30 on one Tuesday each month, but never after 8:30 and never on Sunday or Monday.

At stake in those long-ago verbal battles were usually such paltry sums that a visitor would have thought us truly beyond help, even from a greater power. Maybe we thought so, too; prayers were often absent from business meetings, as I recall.

The results were not all bad, however. Instead of disagreeing with each other about the truly important business of helping each other not take the first drink today, we worked off our tempers by arguing over trivial bookkeeping details, and little harm was done.

Indeed, one hung-over fellow attended his very first AA meeting, by mistake, on the night we were stomping all over a new little baby budget for the group, shyly proposed by a new treasurer. We started at 7:30, waxed wackier and wrother than usual, and by 10:30 never had gotten around to mentioning alcoholism at all, much less recovery. As soon as the meeting was over, however, this new prospect rushed up to the somewhat wrung-out, harassed chairman and pumped his hand joyously. “I want to join!” he exclaimed. “I can tell you’re my kind of people, all right!’’ And he never took another drink.

I have sat in on many such group donnybrooks which were, or could have been, halted by judicious study and prayerful application of the wisdom of our Seventh Tradition. Such as:

Members had to sit on boxes and a bench at meetings of a small group I used to attend near skid row. So the state’s tax-supported alcoholism clinic offered them some fancy chairs. (They declined gracefully, and proudly salvaged some secondhand ones for themselves.)

In another group, the meeting place badly needed a coat of paint, and a rich woman member, who had never stayed sober, insisted on footing the whole bill. (Instead of giving in, they waited until the treasury could buy the paint, and all pitched in to do the work. She helped—and started staying sober.)

A church told a big group that met there that AA’s money was not needed, so the group collections just piled up for several years. (Free use of the space was, of course, really the acceptance of an outside contribution. Subsidized by the church, the group was not autonomous; the church treated it as if it were just another church activity, canceling its meetings during Christmas and other holi­days, moving it from attic to basement, and so on. When the group treasury reached $700, quarreling broke out, and the group died.)

In one small town, local AA life centers around a club, known locally as “the AA club.” Its officers wanted to pay off the club mortgage with raffles and benefit dances—selling tickets to the public. (As any Traditions lawyer can explain, technically a club is not a group and is therefore free to do such things. But is that the spirit of AA? What impression would this give the townsfolk—and prospective members?)

Another group I used to visit meets in a charitable institution which does not allow a collection at any meeting on its premises. One year, the institution wanted to send, from its own funds, a donation to GSO, to be credited to the AA group concerned. (That year, I was general service committee member for the district in which that group meets, so the group’s GSR (general service representative) and I had many discussions about this!)

In the last case, I do not know what the final decision was. But I learned that there is far more to this Tradition than I had seen at first reading.

The lessons kept coming. One small group in the district I served had a GSR who made sure everyone in the group understood the nature of the message-carrying done at GSO, and the fact that there was (as there still is) no one but us to foot the bills. That group sent in a whopping donation to GSO each year, plus paying all its other obligations, while much bigger groups sent in only one-fifth as much. That bugged me. Somebody wasn’t paying his fair share, pulling his own weight. On my podium of self-importance, as the righteous committee member, I prepared to speechify about it.

Fortunately, I looked at my own record first.

Thanks to AA, I was earning enough of a steady salary to throw a buck into the hat twice a week. That was my share, wasn’t it? But wait a minute. Some newcomers were not able to afford giving anything yet. When I was new, obviously someone had, without my knowing it, put in enough to make up my share, as well as his own. And before that, how much had I spent annually on booze?

For the first time, I took a serious look at my group treasurer’s report and at the GSO financial statements printed in the annual Conference Report, to see where I myself fitted in. I looked at my group’s total contribution to our intergroup office and to GSO. I discovered there was a limit, then $100, now $200, [in 1984, 500] set on the amount any one individual could give to such offices in one year. Apparently, some people had been privately making direct gifts for years to help keep those places going.

To say I began doing the same is not immodest, because it had taken me so long to get around to it. And guess what! That year, for the very first time in my life, I found a faint glimmering of what self-respect means.

Of course, from the realization of my financial responsibility for seeing that the AA message got carried, it was only a short step to a sharp look at my other behavior with money. Technically, since sobering up in AA I had been almost completely self-supporting, declining outside contributions. But I often acted as if I somehow deserved special financial consideration.

For example, when I first got sober, I had rather promptly paid off most debts, and it felt wonderful being able to hold up my head, debt-free for a change. Except…loans a brother and a cousin had made to me remained unpaid a long time. I let them wait until last (and paid no interest), vaguely feeling that they didn’t need the money as much as I did. They never asked me for it, so I was buying new suits and other things I enjoyed (telling myself that I owed these to myself), long before I got around to paying these two legitimate debts. Hardly mature, responsible behavior!

My analyst and I tussled with this problem for many dreary months, ending in a draw. I am still at it, with only occasional, thin patches of success. I still find it too easy to rationalize postponing payments of my American Express bill this month if there is something else I’d rather do with the money.

That’s what I meant when I said that AA principles are hard for me to practice in all my affairs. But our Seventh Tradition has shed light and pointed a direction for me to follow, when I will and can.

Our Traditions have always made it possible for me to stay sober. But they also teach me lessons for the other parts of my life. In this instance, an AA path of service (being a committee member) led me right into the inside core of me, where broad roads of self-improvement had never been traveled. When I then began to try to behave responsibly in financial matters, to act as if I really were self-supporting, my new feeling about myself was quite different from any I had ever known before.

At last I was starting to grow up, I felt. I was forty years old at the time.

B.L., New York, N.Y.