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SLAA Meeting Minutes from Monday, August 15, 2005

Those present: VJ, KenV, Lynn, ewg, Circe, carebear, chuck66

A discussion was brought up by VJ about the lack of involvement of Operators and the floor was opened for discussion. KenV suggested a possible mandatory involvement. Lynn suggested that Operators might not want to commit to a schedule and might be more willing to serve if they just showed up at meetings and led the meeting. KenV suggested selecting a person at random to Operators to get used to doing service work and giving people practice. Lynn suggested a buddy system to help people alleviate fears of service work. VJ suggested the possibility of limiting Operators and having more people just lead the meetings who weren’t necessarily Operators. EWG suggested OP guidelines if they weren’t in place to help alleviate these issues. Circe went to check the SLAA site for the guidelines if it was in place.
KenV suggested an informal hierarchy of Operators, a training period and a probationary period. Lynn questioned who decides if someone becomes an Operator or not. VJ told of how the Operators had been chosen as far as she knew, which was if the person had caused problems, acted out, reached the other requirements in place. Circe reported back to the group that the requirements of an Operator were 30 days of abstinence, being in good standing, having no bans in the previous 30 days. Circe then checked for guidelines for Operators per requested by Ken and Lynn. KenV then suggested that there might be a master list of people who could be Operators so they could be messaged for assistance for a meeting service. Circe then reported that Cstar lists all people with 100 status/ OP status but this list needs updating.
Circe then suggested lets get ops and then concentrate on organizing what we have and lets get nominations out of the way and let's clean up the website so far I found something on greeters and it is not showing on the website, it is orphaned just like the officer file was I will have to fix that let me keep looking for operator rules. KenV then reiterated what he thought the agenda should be: 1. Deal with nominations.2. Clean up the web site so that orphaned pages are now accessible 3. Find a mechanism to try and entice potential new ppl to serve (alleviate the fears). VJ suggested taking one thing at a time.
She suggested that we had been discussing OP would you like to table this discussion til next month and come up with ideas and move onto the next topic or tighten up the OP issue more? Lynn requested to experiment this month by having current op's invite members to lead with them assisting them and maybe by next month we will have people willing to sign on as ops. Circe then added that nothing is in the guidelines on Operator but only on greeters. She requested that the guideline committee could draft an OP guideline. VJ then suggested contacting the guideline committee to come up with guidelines for an OP and put up a banner in the room requesting people to help during the meetings and there will be training available from the OPs if they are willing to serve. Circe made a motion that we contact the guideline committee to come up with guidelines for an OP and put up a banner in the room requesting people to help during the meetings but suggested that these be separate motions. Lynn agreed and VJ didn’t understand. Circe questioned the training methods necessary. Ken then asked that the wording for the banner be carefully made. The motion was made again by VJ: I make a motion that we contact the guideline committee to come up with guidelines for an OP and put up a banner in the room requesting people to help during the meetings. KenV seconded this motion. The motion was voted on and passed.

Next on the agenda was the website. Circe made a report to the group. She explained how she had contacted Yahoo to explain the harassment and the website being taken down. She explained how SLAA has the copyright and the complainant has the burden of proof before the site should be taken down. Then Circe explained how the site having been down for such a period of time was missing the meeting minutes which aren’t able to be retrieved.
She added that there are many broken links in the website needing to be repaired. She has repaired what she has seen but if any more are noticed she requests people to contact her to have them repaired. She suggested soliciting new stories and art work from the group for the new website. Circe told the group that she is paying $12 a month to maintain the site, and she would like to put on the agenda that we consider starting a seventh tradition for this group, just like they have for every other regular meeting and left over contributions can be sent to central office. We have Post office box and that will need to be renewed and paid for too. She stated that, a few of us have been carrying the financial burden of all of this the post office box, the copyright costs, and now the web hosting on Yahoo. Can we please put this on our agenda? VJ asked Circe if this could be set into the following agenda
1) last years minutes
2) Website help
3) Tradition 7
Ewg suggested that in his scripts contributions be made to FWS.
Circe suggested that most 12 step groups collect within their own group to pay their expenses and send what is left to FWS.
She continued to report expenses we incur are rent on the online group, the website and the PO Box. This would also require treasurer’s positions she added.
She also stated that the PO Box is in previous officer’s names as is the copyright to the site. She suggested she would draft a letter releasing all rights to the copyright to SLAA and also change ownerships of the PO Box. EWG added that physical access to the PO Box is an item to be considered. Circe asked for a back up to report to someone what comes in and how the funds are spent and let them keep the ledgers and let the group decide when to contribute to FWS. EWG asked if we could work with fws through our liaison to allow our group to earmark contributions for this group and manage both receipts of contributions and payment of bills through cooperation of some sort with them and 2nd point it seems no matter what we decide to do in order to manage funds we will need to explore the creation of a group treasurer position. VJ didn’t like the idea of letting FWS apportion the funds as we need to take care of our own expenses first. VJ also requested that if Circe wants to take on this task it would alleviate the group of trying to find someone to do this job. Eric offered to be the pair of second ‘eyes’ to overlook Circes job as treasurer of the group. Circe brought up the issue of having 3 people sign off for any non profit organization account at the bank. Circe suggested people send in cash donations wrapped in paper and then putting them in a bank bag. EWG then suggested using paypal to cover the problems with the donations. EWG then suggested making a link on the website for contributions. Circe requested tabling this issue until next months meeting.

Next Circe nominated EWG to an officer position. The rest of the meeting went over the guidelines for officers and if they needed to be changed. Circe noted that since it was a ‘skeleton’ crew of officers that we needed to be flexible with the guidelines. This item was also tabled. The meeting ended

The meeting was adjourned with the Serenity Prayer at 12:26 AM Submitted by VJ