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
- See clean copy of the bylaws
that was distributed at this meeting.
- Substantial unanimity 2/3 majority per Intergroup bylaws. This
discussion is moved to next month’s meeting.
- 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.
- 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.
Edited for the web 12 March 2013