West Great Lakes ACA Intergroup

“Our common welfare must come first,” these are the first words of the first Tradition and our common welfare is calling us to make change to business as usual.

Yesterday (March 17) the Governor of Wisconsin signed a declaration prohibiting all gatherings, public or private, planned or spontaneous of 10 or more people. As this is being written Illinois is prohibiting gatherings of 50 or more while the White House is advising against gatherings of 10 or more. Each day we get additional reports that the facilities in which we meet are being closed and are no longer available for our meetings. Ours is normally a high touch and high care activity which, when we observe the recommended social distancing of 6 feet is not possible, however, the task of recovery still calls us.

While not perfect solutions we will offer below suggestions on how to continue to provide safe places for recovery either by taking part in existing remote/virtual groups or by providing virtual spaces of your own.

We will also publicize cancellations and changes of which we are informed and how those groups are operating going forward. We also will publicize the good news when things return to normal!

First things first. When your group meeting needs to be cancelled or have its meeting move online or on to a phone meeting first go to the Adult children meeting page and update your listing. This is a self service area that your meeting contact has the right to update whenever they want and is the first place to provide updated information. If the contact person is not up to date there are procedures there to update that information so you can then update the information. Please go to https://adultchildren.org/meeting-search/ to update that information.

For regular remote and virtual meeting the same address has links on the right side where you can search for already running phone and computer meetings. You will want to check out the instructions first though because the ones that I’ve attended required you to call the contact person to get the meeting number before you could attend and that is difficult if the meeting has already begun!

Options for Conferencing

Adultchildren.org – We mentioned above that you can search for existing remote and virtual meetings provided by the WSO. Please visit https://adultchildren.org/meeting-search/ and click one of the links on the right for Telephone or Online meetings.

Freeconferencecall.com – For quite some time the Intergroup used https://www.freeconferencecall.com/. When we started using that service it was a telephone conference call only service. The have since added online conferencing that allow users to connect either online or by phone. The service is free although they give you the opportunity to contribute to the service. We have not extensively tested this service since the addition of the online conferencing but we were happy with the telephone conferencing when we used it. A user would create an account and share the conference id and participants can join using the online address of your meeting or the phone number and PIN. Both Freeconferencecall.com and Zoom have available smart phone apps.

Zoom.us – Intergroup has moved its regular meetings to Zoom which allows scheduling meetings and giving them all unique ids and recurring schedules. If needed you can create a password for entry and curate who you allow in. While you can create meetings with a free account, the free account only allows 45 minute meetings. Yeah, I know, right? A paid account allows nearly unlimited meetings, duration and participants. Advantages include the facts that you can pre-schedule recurring meetings, each meeting can have its own unique address and code, and you can access those meeting using a computer with camera and mic, smartphone or plain old telephone. Intergroup is opening up the service to groups in our area that would like to use the service to provide a meeting space for their group. The catch is that currently we can’t host more than 2 meetings at the same time. If you are interested please have your contact person or Intergroup rep contact secretary@westgreatlakesaca.org or chair@westgreatlakesaca.org.

Changes and information around the Intergroup concerning COVID-19

Please click on the title of each post below for more details about each change.