The NA Way

Well, yes and no. Fellowship growth does “just happen” through the usual means of local services, sponsorship, etc.; however, spontaneous growth doesn’t rule out the need for a plan so that Narcotics Anonymous World
Services can make the most effective use of its resources in the services it provides to the fellowship.

Judging by the number of questions about fellowship development that are directed to staff at the World Service Office, we believe it’s time to do a little communicating about fellowship development and what it means to the fellowship as a whole. We’ve gathered what seem to be the most frequently asked questions and provided
answers to them below.

What is fellowship development
(as done by world services)?

In the simplest terms, fellowship development is any effort provided by NAWS to help the fellowship grow and develop. However, we hesitate to define it in such simple terms because
it’s always changing in response to the needs of the fellowship.

The types of fellowship development efforts offered to a local NA community depend on what kind of NA community it is, where it’s located, and whether or not it has easy access to more experienced NA communities.

How much of the world services
budget is devoted to fellowship development?

In truth, almost all of the money that we spend in world services is geared toward fellowship development, either directly or indirectly.

For direct expenses, we can use the example of last year’s WSC budget of about $500,000. About twenty-five percent of that budget went directly to fellowship development in the form of
trips by trusted servants, providing free literature, and bringing people to participate in the World Service Conference.

Except for what are commonly known as operational costs—the cost of production and distribution, general administrative expenses, and the staff overhead for those specific Expenses —the remainder of the world services budget is also devoted to fellowship development. This can be as simple as the WSO being there when people call to ask for information, or collecting information that can be used to help the fellowship grow.

For instance, the WSO records as much as it can about NA’s beginnings and growth in each local NA community. This information is very helpful when an NA community finds itself facing some of the challenges that were successfully met in another NA community. It sometimes saves a community from going through the same kinds of pain an earlier NA community went through.

Who decides how much of the
world services budget is spent on
fellowship development?

It’s usually a combined decision of the World Board and the World Service Conference. The World Board develops a budget for approval by the WSC that includes such expenses, or sometimes the WSC will take action that affects the expenses devoted to fellowship development.

For instance, when the WSC decided to conduct a world services inventory, it suspended the work of all the conference committees with the exception of the world services Translations Committee. By that action, the conference expressed its belief that translating NA literature is so important that it should be among the services that are provided no matter what.

The conference could have decided that
it was more important to have another world services meeting during the year, but it made translations a priority.

In the last several years, the WSC has concentrated more on setting overall priorities for world services and less on the details connected with carrying out those priorities. In other words, the conference will say, for instance, that bringing delegates from new NA communities to the WSC is important (in 1998, about $30,000 was used to
help fund fifteen participants at the conference); bringing a committee together to rewrite its internal guidelines is not so important. Then the conference delegates to the World Board the responsibility for allocating funds according to the priorities it set.

How is it decided which developing
communities to target?

It’s been done in different ways over
the past ten years. Basically, it depends on what kind of help is needed. As different communities around the world grow and develop, they create groups such as zonal forums where they’re using their own resources to do some of the things that world services may have done initially. The communities involved in a zonal forum can share with one another their experience with forming a service structure and providing services.

An NA community’s needs change from year to year, depending on what stage of growth it reaches. For instance, this year, the WSO has had many inquiries from the Middle East. The inquiries haven’t been so much about basic issues like meeting formats, setting up a service structure, and distributing literature; they’ve been more about concerns that come up when they need to interact with their national governments. This is a developmental issue in many countries where, in fact, NA cannot exist unless it registers with the government. Much of the help world services has provided in the Middle East this past year has been in the form of information about how NA can organize itself so that it stays within
the traditions and also keeps the laws of the country in which it exists. Because there is no zonal forum in that part of the world, a great deal of the responsibility for helping falls on world services.

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