“What do you think made the Nashville
meetings the way they are, Harvey A.?”

There I was sitting at an AA meeting in early Feb ‘84, when a man announced he was starting an SA group in Nashville, TN. I surrendered six weeks later when I met at his apartment for my first SA meeting. Soon we outgrew his apartment and moved to my office building. That first year we had one meeting a week with about 100 people coming and going, mostly going. After a few months we had our first woman attend who became a major sober member to help anchor the meetings. From the beginning we drew many women to the fellowship.

We outgrew my office and began meeting at churches. After a few years we were up to two meetings a day. Along came a young man who needed more meetings. He began meetings during the day also which made our meetings more accessible, especially to members with younger children at home. We began to notice the more meetings we had the more people would show up.

In the early years we sent out brochures to all the helping professionals and clergy in our community. It took us two years to complete this task. The concept of abundance not scarcity was a centerpiece for our growth.

We utilized the practice of the 30-day sobriety imperative (SA 198), meaning people with less than 30 days sobriety would be able to share only after the first 30 minutes of the meeting. This kept our meetings in the solution rather than the problem.

We began having more and more longer term sober people attend our meetings. Today there are at least five people with 30 years or more of sobriety still in the fellowship from those early years of SA in Nashville.

We tended to not have strong intergroups but emphasized the individual autonomy of each meeting group.

We emphasized having guest speakers from around the country come to speak to us twice a year. We looked forward to having ideas presented to us from other parts of the country.

In addition to having women at all our meetings we realized the women increased their sobriety numbers by also having their own meetings too.

Before COVID we had at least 45 meetings a week in our vicinity. Many of our meetings would need 2-4 breakout groups because of the large attendance. What has lead to our growth in Nashville, in my opinion:

1. A miracle.
2. The willingness for outreach into the community.
3. The willingness for many of us to break our personal anonymity in our community on a one to one basis.
4. Basing our model on the AA disease concept.
5. Having meetings focus on the solution not the problem.
6. My willingness as the longest sober member to not get involved in intergroup after the first few years in order to avoid influencing the direction of the growth of the fellowship.
7. To emphasize that a loving God of our understanding is running the show through our group consciousness, not through any one or a few people.
8. To stay out of any international SA controversies and just let time deal with them.
9. Last but not least is to remember there are no big deals and that our essence as a fellowship is unity.