Update For Policy-and-admissions – May 2025
Report for PAC – Policies & Admissions Committee – May 2025
Policy & Admissions Committee (PAC) Report May 2025
What We Do:
The Policy & Admissions Committee (PAC) assists new groups in registering and listing their A.A. meetings on the OIAA meeting directory. Our responsibilities include:
- Reviewing new meeting submission forms for completeness and compliance with directory listing guidelines.
- Ensuring that new meetings/groups retain a Traditions statement.
- Assisting new member groups in listing their Intergroup representatives at the time of registration.
- Helping meetings/groups regain their status for relisting in the OIAA directory or as Intergroup representatives if they have lapsed.
- Addressing complaints and answering questions regarding meetings/groups listed in the OIAA directory.
- Providing policy and guideline advisories to any interested parties.
What we did: Committee actions from to May 1 to May 31, 2025:
- New meeting submission forms reviewed: 70
- New meeting submission forms processed to listed completion: 29
- Meetings listed with an IGR: 5 (17% of May listings)
- Outstanding – waiting for reply: 21
- Declined listings: 5
- Sent to Steppers: 0
- Sent to PIC: 0
- Requested removal: 0
- Decided Not to List: 0
- Duplicates/Not a Listing/An Update/Hold/Spam/Already Listed: 15
- Complaints/Concerns: 5
- OIAA policy/guideline advisory: 2
Bill Wilson, AA’s co-founder, wrote this in the July 1946 Grapevine:
So long as there is the slightest interest in sobriety, the most unmoral, the most anti-social, the most critical alcoholic may gather about him a few kindred spirits and announce to us that a new Alcoholics Anonymous Group has been formed. Anti-God, anti-medicine, anti-our Recovery Program, even anti-each other — these rampant individuals are still an AA Group if they think so! (Italics in the original.)
Tradition Four reminds us that each group is autonomous, provided its actions do not adversely affect AA as a whole. The common theme for all AA meetings is to carry the message to the alcoholic who still suffers. Any person with a desire to stop drinking cannot be turned away if a group wishes to continue identifying as an AA meeting.
This Tradition allows each group to shape its structure and format—including accommodating cultural differences—so long as the group maintains the spirit of our primary purpose and does not cause harm to AA as a whole.
In short, the Fourth Tradition suggests that each AA group maintains the right to determine its own practices and policies through the workings of its own group conscience. This right ought not, however, be extended to the taking of actions that involve establishing outside affiliations or allegiances or making policy decisions that veer so far from the spirit of AA’s Traditions that injury to AA and/or other groups results.
Ultimately, as Bill put it, under the auspices of Tradition Four, each group has the “right to be wrong.” I may not like how another group does things—I may even disapprove—but short of harming AA as a whole, they have every right to proceed as they wish and should not be excluded for doing so.
This principle is especially relevant to the work we do in the PAC. We’re sometimes asked whether a particular group or meeting format is “really AA,” and it can be tempting to rush to judgment, especially when practices diverge sharply from our own. But our role is not to police or exclude. Our responsibility is to uphold the Traditions while respecting each group’s autonomy. Tradition Four reminds us to proceed with caution, humility, and love—asking whether a group’s actions truly harm AA as a whole, or whether they simply reflect a different way of carrying the message. We can offer experience, share our understanding of the Traditions, and point to the spiritual principles that have guided AA for nearly 90 years. But we do so in the spirit of service, not control.
Thank you for the opportunity to serve.
Beth D. and Jan BB, OIAA PAC
