New H&I Chair, Website, Objectives

My name is Jason P and as new H&I Chair as of 3 weeks ago, in collaboration with the committee I will work to explore implementing some changes. I don’t know of any work including our own jobs and businesses that is more important than the work of ensuring we effectively carry the message to those that don’t yet know there is a way out of darkness and into the most amazing life they could never conceive.

Thanks to the work of the most recent H&I committee with Jon O, Thomas K, Mary, and Billy the office manager for getting H&I going again!

The only reason I write this paragraph is because I think it’s important to acknowledge the past, so we can put the necessary checks and balances in place so it doesn’t happen again. When I first came into recovery 5 years ago and was told to get an H&I commitment by my sponsor, I was forced to work through the fellowship of CA since South Palm Beach county AA H&I wasn’t functioning at all. Thanks to the amazing work of CA I learned and was involved in H&I as a volunteer. Thank you to CA Larry, Mark, Natalia and others and Broward county AA H&I more recently for being an inpiration. Thank you to Broward county AA H&I for providing us with documents, and ideas about framework.

As of July 27, 2022 we were bringing in 26 weekly meetings into 9 facilities with 27 volunteers. This was put together very recently from scratch by an interim H&I committee instituted by the steering committee/Billy (SPBCI office manager). Now we can set out to really grow that and broaden our reach significantly.

It’s notable that Delray Beach and this area in general is considered the capital of USA recovery; there is very significant room expand the reach of our message and lives depend on it.

As the H&I chair I will work at minimum toward exploring in collaboration with the committee the following objectives:

• Provide transparency and accountability to the body by publishing the meetings we bring to facilities & open/unfilled commitments.
• Create H&I website with functionality to submit volunteer applications, request a meeting in a facility, contact H&I directly, submit complaints about our meetings/volunteers, schedules, and resources like meeting format scripts.
• Create/publish speaker exchange / Telegram app live messaging group
• Maximize volunteer opportunties & provide quick turnaround time for those looking to volunteer with H&I
  • 5 day max turnaround time, ideally, for volunteers looking for commitments.
  • 7 day max turnaround time for facilities looking for meetings.
• Change volunteer commitments from weekly to alternating every other week
• Assign multiple chairs to meetings, including simultaneous male/female coverage for coed meetings:
  • Multiple chairs can share experience, strength, and hope and improve performance.
  • Gets more volunteers involved and better unification.
  • Looks very good to facility attendees when we turn up with more people in support of AA.
  • Mitigates the possibility of facility meetings being skipped by our volunteers without us knowing.
  • Having an abundance of volunteers means we can easily cover new facility requests by transferring volunteers between commitments.
• Ensure continual effectiveness of H&I in the future through changing committees
  • Explore writing an H&I steering committee into the intergroup bylaws, or if that cannot be accomplished mirror Broward county and incorporate separately. I believe we absolutely need a steering committee written into some bylaws, this means officers can change roles going into the next period so that we aren’t starting from scratch potentially everytime, and, so there is multiple responsible parties. Currently we only elect a single H&I committee chair, and success or failure rests just on them unless someone else picks up the slack.
• Create and publish H&I guidelines
  • Minimum number of rules possible, not creating rules just for the sake of it, but only for necessities.
• Create orientation system, potentially an online format including a brief quiz in order to streamline.
• Work with Bridge the gap to conceptualize an effective system to actually ‘bridge the gap’ to facility attendees upon leaving the facility.
  • Business cards handed out at facility meetings.
  • Publish information on H&I site about bridge the gap.
  • I don’t have this fully conceptualized yet how this might work.
• Possibly distribute plastic meeting bins to keep at facilities with the necessary materials including laminated meeting formats/readings, possibly some literature, possibly chips. (like CA does)
• Discuss changing up meeting formats to include a brief meditation and some important excerpts from the Doctor’s opinion.

In service,

Jason P