Workshops in Brighton
As well as being responsible for supporting our existing GSRs, and supplying new GSRs with the appropriate literature, our vice chair runs workshops on behalf of Brighton Area intergroup. Her brief is to run four workshops each year but she also ran four additional workshops at the Brighton Convention in January.
We have run face-to-face workshops on the following topics:
- How the 12 Concepts for World Service apply to you and to your meetings
- Sponsorship
- Being an effective telephone responder
- Writing step 4
- Running healthy meetings
We’ve also run online workshops on the 12 concepts and we run our telephone responder training/induction sessions online.
Our next workshop ‘Wellbeing in recovery’ explores how we practice the principles of honesty, courage, humility and love in all our affairs.
We have a fairly standard approach to our 2-hour workshops:
- coffee followed by the preamble
- an outline of what we’re going to cover during the workshop
- an interactive session where we divide participants into groups and invite them to share their experience of the topic. Each group appoints a spokesperson who shares a summary of their thoughts with the other groups
- one, two, three or four ‘chairs’ who share their experience, strength and hope on the topic
- a question and answer session
- feedback forms and the serenity prayer
For each workshop we create a session plan like the one below. It helps us to understand who is doing what; what we need to bring and how much time we have for each part of the workshop.
We believe that using a session plan makes the whole process easier. And it removes much of the pressure.
We both think it is much more fun to work together. We occasionally meet for coffee or lunch to plan our sessions and discuss possible future workshops.
We are running an online workshop on ‘Being an effective GSR’ at 18:30 on 6 October 2026. We’ll also have a Q&A to answer any questions about running workshops. Here’s a link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2886365963. The Meeting ID is 2886 365 5963. There is no password. Everybody is welcome to attend.
We both get so much out of running workshops. The participants are universally enthusiastic and they like the opportunities to share their own experience as well as learning from the experience of others.
We are happy to help anybody who’s planning workshops, or who’s already running them, and who would like to hear more about our experience of this very rewarding area of service in AA. Get in touch!
Jakki B – vice-chair.brighton@aamail.org
Alan M – treasurer.brighton@aamail.org