St. Paul Al-Anon Intergroup Meeting
Minutes – February 12, 2013

The meeting was called to order at 7:00pm with a moment of silence followed by the Serenity Prayer.

Introductions
Chair, Inner Peace Thursday 11 am Al-Anon
IR. Your Are Not Alone Al-Anon
Vice Chair, IR, Uptown Tuesday 6:30 Al-Anon
Assistant Treasurer, Alternate IR, Midway Wednesday 6:30 pm Al-Anon
Secretary. IR, Uptown Monday 8 pm Al-Anon
MN South Area Liaison, IR, Compassion Al-Anon, St. Paul
Treasurer, IR Summit Hill Wednesday 5 pm
Member, Inner Peace Thursday 11 am Al-Anon
IR, Steps to Inner Peace Saturday 11 am Al-Anon
Speaker Chair, IR, Fireside Al-Anon

A quorum (>= 5% of 111 groups = 6) of Intergroup Representatives (IRs) was present.

There was a reading on Step/Tradition/Concept 2.

Elections

Secretary
A member Uptown Monday 8 pm Al-Anon was elected unanimously
Other positions
They were filled at the January meeting.

Reports

Chair
Secretary
She is learning her new position. She summarized the minutes of the January meeting at which she was Secretary pro tem.
Treasurer
She reported the treasury balance as $10,992.54. She paid bills totaling $3,654.06 including sales tax in Janurary. Do we want to move more money to reserves? We generally keep a balance of $7,000 in the checking account. It was moved and seconded and unanimously voted to move over enough money from the checking to raise the reserve to $5,000. A question was raised as to whether there a minimum balance requirement on the checking account.
A question came up as to whether we are supposed to do a yearly audit. There was an audit in 2012 by the current Treasurer of the 2011 Treasurer’s transactions, but no audit of the Assistant Treasurer’s activity. Three IRs need to be on the audit committee amd need to preform a yearly audit. The Assistant Treasurer requested an audit of his activities. We need to examine yearly reimbursements. The Treasurer said it took her a few hours last year to trace deposits and disbursements. The Assistant Treasurer thinks his audit might be done on a month pulled at random from the year. The Chair will consider her options on audit and let us know.
Assistant Treasurer
He presented graphs of sales and contribution income from early 2011 until January 2012.
Newsletter
The current editor will continue in this service commitment. We are in great need of articles to put in the newsletter.
Office Volunteers
The Office Volunteer Chair sent a report that there are still two days to be covered in February (2/18 and 2/20) and lots of days in March need to be covered. On the website calendar, open days show up in Red. Contact her to get trained. There is also a great volunteer manual in the office. Someone questioned if this should be put online?
Speaker Chair
He remarked he would like to rotate out of the position, which is a 12 month commitment. Two groups want a speaker once a month. There are other groups that may pop up in need occasionally. He is willing to pass this position along if someone else would like to take the service opportunity.
Website/Directory
Intergroup has its own home page on the AIS/Intergroup website. See www.al-anon-alateen-msp.org/pages/SPIGHome/.
Group Liaison
OPEN POSITION
Event Sales
OPEN POSITION

Business

  1. See clean copy of the bylaws that was distributed at this meeting.
  2. Substantial unanimity 2/3 majority per Intergroup bylaws. This discussion is moved to next month’s meeting.
  3. Open Service Positions still exist. Please discuss this as your meeting and come back to serve. A group can serve in the service positions; it doesn’t have to be one person alone though a representative from the group should be elected to be in touch with intergroup. A member at the meeting will look into the Group Liaison position.
  4. Brainstorming and Goal Setting for 2013
    Do a book drive
    This would be to provide Al-Anon literature to treatment centers
    Put on a 4th step workshop
    People ask for 4th step workshop a lot by calling into the office
    How would we do this? It could be a 1 hour informational workshop. Or it could be a 4-6 week workshop to complete a 4th step. There is a Big Book 4th Step informational workshop that is open AA and is regularly scheduled.
    There was discussion on whether a Big Book based workshop should be promoted by Al Anon.
    Al-Anon districts have hosted 4th step workshops in the past.
    Do we want to do other informational or service workshops?
    Perhaps we should simply trim it down and try to focus on keeping our office open the hours it needs to be.
    Is putting on workshops an objective of Intergroup? Are we serving our members better by keeping the doors open or by trying different activities to reach other members?
    We will continue the discussion at the March meeting.

The meeting adjourned at 8:07 pm with the Al-Anon Declaration at 8:00 pm.

The next meeting will be March 12 at 7 pm at the Griggs Midway building.


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Edited for the web 12 March 2013