“A month ago, I had never heard of virtual AA meetings.”
Meetings on a screen
In March 2020 the coronavirus closed the churches, clubhouses and halls where AA groups met. AA’s General Service Office in New York, which doesn’t make decisions for groups, passed on what groups were doing in a notice of March 19: following officials’ guidelines on distancing, keeping in touch by phone and email, and meeting on “digital platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, or conducting conference calls.”
The office itself emptied. Under the orders of New York’s governor and mayor, its staff worked from home. “There is no one in the office to make copies or answer the phones,” Michele Grinberg, the chair of AA’s General Service Board, told AA’s Conference that May.
Groups that had met in the same room for years learned to meet on a screen. In Slinger, Wisconsin, Ruth H., retired, and her husband set up online meetings for their home groups. “We became tutors to old-timers and newcomers in technology that we were learning ourselves,” she wrote. She took her own meetings upstairs, to keep them private from a husband now working at home, and made it part of her service to call members who couldn’t get online.
In Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Judith H. had never heard of virtual meetings a month before. Now, she wrote, they were her connection to her groups, her sponsees and her friends, almost every day. “Sobriety, apparently, isn’t just limited to church basements.” She had looked in the Big Book for stories of a plague and found none, but she remembered what AA’s literature said about the war: alcoholics had stayed sober then, “while cut off from sober friends and family.”
Not everyone had a computer, or wanted one. Suzette P. lived alone in Niskayuna, New York, working nine hours a day from her kitchen, in the house where she had once drunk alone. A friend gave her “a conference bridge number” for a meeting of the Blue Mountain Group, every evening at seven, by telephone: the same kind of call five groups had tried in 1966, as 6 · Bulletin boards tells.
The rest of AA moved too. In May 2020 the General Service Conference, the yearly meeting of delegates and trustees, met on a screen for the first time, 135 members “from Hawaii to Newfoundland,” for essential business only. The International Convention planned for Detroit that July, for AA’s 85th birthday, was canceled, and aa.org put up an online version for the month instead. In April 2021 the Conference met online again, and took up the question of what the new meetings were.
It’s March 2020. The churches and clubhouses where AA groups meet are locking their doors, and within days the meetings move to telephones and laptops.
In Wisconsin, a retired member and her husband set up online meetings for their home groups, and teach the old-timers how to join. In Pennsylvania, a woman who had never heard of a virtual meeting a month before is at one almost every day. In upstate New York, a member who lives alone dials a number every evening at seven, and a meeting answers.
AA’s own office in New York is empty; the staff work from home. That May, for the first time, AA’s yearly Conference meets on a screen. And one member, who had searched the Big Book for a story about a plague, remembers that alcoholics stayed sober through a world war, cut off from their sober friends.