The AA we have now was passed down to us as three legacies: Recovery, Unity, and Service. Each have a set of twelve principles. In 1938 Bill W formulized the Twelve Steps of Recovery based partly on the principles of an earlier Christian movement but largely on the process of his own recovery. As the Fellowship grew so did conflicts. So in 1946 Bill started publishing essays called “Twelve Points to Ensure our Future” which were accepted in 1950 as the Twelve Traditions of Unity. The next year, 1951, was the beginning of annual Conferences to handle the nuts and bolts of our international (US & Canada) operation. It too had a similar maturation process and so in 1962 we accepted Bill’s writings on their processes which became the Twelve Concepts of World Service. While some of these last principles apply only at the national level, several are equally applicable to our Area Assembly meetings, Intergroup Operating Committee or Advisory Meetings, or even Group Conscience meetings.

The 4^th edition of the Big Book, first published in 2001, added these last dozen principles as pages 574-5. About that time Gail L, then Akron AA Archivist, asked me to put together a presentation on these. I conferred with another member equally cognizant of the Concepts and we arrived at about a half-hour presentation. We presented this recently to a small group on Zoom and it went well enough that we dare present it to a wider audience. So Sunday May 17 at 1:00 pm EDT, Jeff Y and I will again present “Conceptualizations.” The Zoom ID is: 856 2437 7470 and 1962 is the password. We expect to give you a basic understanding of these practices and hope you find them worthwhile.