Listed below is the Central Office financial report, prepared by our secretary, Nan, and Terry M. Note that for the first time, Essay is listing groups that have donated as groups to our world services Central Office work. Nan tells us it isn’t always clear whether donations are from groups or individuals, so there may be some glitches here. But it’s an eye-opener for all of us.

Any sober SA members interested in being a coordinator for corresponding with loner members without groups, much as Matt is doing with those in prison, please write Central Office. Please provide a brief summary of your story and length and condition of sobriety, why you’re interested in the job, and any other pertinent information for qualification.

Nan, our Central Office secretary for the last couple of years, has agreed to be office manager as well as secretary, if she limits her work to less than full time. This new situation has come about since the last three secretaries haven’t worked out, since the Central Office has moved to commercial office space, and since Roy has withdrawn from being CO manager.

As announced at Bozeman, Matt W. of Kansas City is SA’s prison coordinator. He is the communication switchboard between SAs behind the wall and members on the outside who wish to correspond with or sponsor those in prison. At present, this involves coordinating well over a hundred SAs inside with those on the outside. This amounts to running a Central Office all its own!

…Thank you for the support that you and SA have given to us in getting a group started within the Arkansas Department of Correction. We have just completed our second meeting and elected our officers, plus we have started our study program of the “White Book” and have found that this program is what we have been searching for.

These last couple of weeks I feel I have begun to understand what surrender really means. I thank God that I never stopped going to the meetings. And I thank God and SA that when I was finally hurting enough to really give up, He and the Fellowship were there for me, and the love and support carried me through withdrawal.

We’ve started a new group in Neenah, WI with 6 to 8 regular members each week! (A group is also going to start in Green Bay soon. Along with Appleton, that makes three for this area.) Also, how would our new group formally register with the Central Office?

We send this check with our best wishes and gratitude from SA in Reykjavik. Our group here is 5-7 members and is very strong.… I am very grateful for SA and what it has done for me. I did not know what my problem was until I met an SA member. One thing I know, without God I can’t stay sober. As a matter of fact, I can’t do anything if I don’t turn my life to God and trust him for my life.

“It was a great conference…the oldtimers meeting was inspiring. It was also comforting to me to see how much solid sobriety we have… It was relaxing to be in such a group.”

In case you’ve been wondering why this issue of ESSAY is late (even with our non-schedule), you should know that letters, phone calls, and literature orders have also been running late. There was a bit of a crisis when our new secretary left without giving notice. Nan was unavailable to come back in and pinch hit until now, so we did the best we could with volunteer help from the local fellowship.

It was certainly helpful for me to get in touch with some of the resentments I still had left concerning my brother in “…” and how praying for a forgiving spirit is certainly helping me feel better about all of this. I have also been able to let go of digging out anymore from my past concerning the sexual abuse situations.

To date we have 30 inmates who want to join the SA group when it gets completely organized.

I have recently been incarcerated on a sexual crime. Within the correctional institution that I have been placed is a Sexaholics Anonymous program. I have gone to a meeting and was advised to obtain your white book on SA. It would help me a great deal to overcome my problem as I need to do.

THANK YOU so much for your response to my call. Your timing and willingness to help are deeply appreciated. With God’s help, a corner has been turned, and with God’s help, the grace will continue to come to take me one step at a time, one day at a time.

The following two member contributions seemed to lend themselves to the above subject. We might consider this as a regular ESSAY feature if others want to answer the same question. (Please include your current length of uninterrupted SA sexual sobriety with your one-paragraph answer to this question.)

Recently we lost one of our members due to a tragic auto accident. He will be missed by all of those who loved him including all of his S.A. brothers here.

I cannot begin to adequately express our gratitude for the literature which your office sent to the men…this December. The meeting book and the ESSAY pamphlets were quickly snapped up at our regular Monday night meeting. We have 19 men actively involved in the S.A. program here at “…” and we are growing constantly.

“Institutions remain cumbersome, easily seduced by their own self-interest, preoccupied with their own survival. It’s a melancholy and ubiquitous fact of life that once an ideal, any ideal, becomes institutionalized, confusion sets in between the accomplishment of the ideal and the aggrandizement of the institution.”

Dear Fellow SAs,
I thought it might be helpful to let you know what our group from West L.A. is doing in response to the financial challenge facing our Central Office. We know that SA as a whole is working on ways to meet this challenge, and whatever recommendations are adopted, we here will seek to support them. However, we feel that whatever we can do in the meantime will be helpful.

We may be experiencing something significant in SA. The Maryland Marathon and Mid-Western Regional reports (elsewhere in this issue) state that the most powerful session of the day (October 18th and 4th) was when, under example of the leader, those members who chose, “gave away their top plate.” As far as we know, this first took place in the Warm Beach, Washington convention last year. In each of these three cases, it was reported by several to have been the most potent or meaningful experience of the get-together.