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Please continue to send us your feedback.  As we have stated in previous issues, we want this newsletter to not only be informative, but also to establish a dialogue between the WB and the Fellowship.  We are continuing to work on finding a truly effective way to communicate with you as a board.   Your input will help us to determine if the information we are providing is valuable and how we can make it even more useful.  We cannot do this alone, remember…“Together we can.” 
 

OUR MOST RECENT MEETING
We met at the WSO over the weekend of 28-30 January 1999.  All board members were present.  Even though our agenda was extensive, we were able to address all of the items.  We are continuing to get comfortable with our new roles and, with a common sense of purpose and responsibility to the worldwide Fellowship, we are finding a balance as a unified board.

We wanted to develop a common understanding of the Twelve Concepts, specifically, how each concept applies to the World Board and how we, as a board, can utilize them in resolving issues.  We also examined how the Concepts determine the work we do.  With this in mind, we began our meeting on Thursday by breaking into three small groups to discuss the first four Concepts. We will review Concept Five through Concept Nine at our next meeting. 
 

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WORLD SERVICE CONFERENCE
1999 Conference Agenda Report:
If you have received the 1999 Conference Agenda Report, you have noticed that we included the issue discussion papers into the body of the CAR for the first time.  We hope that this will make it easier for these issues to be discussed at the CAR workshops since we expect that these two issues, Resolution A and Improving Fellowship Communications, will be a large portion of the discussions held at this WSC.  The 1999 CAR is available in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Swedish, and German.  This is the first time that the issue discussion papers have been translated.  As another first this year, we have placed the CAR on our web site, www.na.org. 

Conference Agenda Report Workshops: 
We discussed the importance of having a conference that meets the needs of the participants with the current structured changes.  Because of the small amount of motions in the 1999 CAR, we feel this would be the perfect opportunity for all members attending the workshops, to start engaging in the dialogue we hope to establish with this new service structure.  The focus of these workshops will be discussions about the designated issue topics as well as, the motions included in the CAR. 

The Conference Week:
We created a draft schedule for the conference week and have assigned three workgroups to develop ideas for the conference discussions on Resolution A and Improving Fellowship Communication, as well as the conference orientation.  We will be finalizing these ideas at our March meeting and invite any input that you may have about the conference week.  We plan to meet together as a board the day before the conference, at least twice during the week, and have a wrap-up meeting after the conference.  We are communicating with the WSC Co-Facilitator, Vinnie F., and he will attend our next board meeting.  There will be more information about the conference week in the March Conference Report as well as, the pre-conference package/mailing.
 
 

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WORKGROUP UPDATE
NA Way Magazine Editorial Board:
The new NA Way Magazine Editorial Board met with the WSO staff members who are responsible for producing this magazine.  The meeting was designed to look at long-term planning; improve ways to assist the staff to carry out their work; and how best to continue to provide a high quality, timely, and translated magazine to the Fellowship.  They also examined ways to reduce the production time, increase the number of articles provided by interested members for publication, and improve the process of soliciting relevant material.  And finally, the workgroup developed a format to use when selecting themes that will help ensure standards and maintain consistency with the magazine’s mission statement and NA principles.

Reaching Out:
Published four times a year, this publication is mailed to local H&I committees and members in institutional settings.  The Reaching Out workgroup discussed the present criterion for articles in the magazine, with an emphasis on continuous improvement.  The workgroup plans to add articles from those NA members on the ‘outside’ who received the NA message while in an institution of some type, but who are not involved with H&I service.  Currently, the section “From the Outside” is dedicated to NA members that participate in H&I service.  The criterion for that section will be changed to include those types of articles. 

Translations:
The Swedish have finished the first translated Basic Text that contains both part one and part two and it is now in the WSO inventory.  The Swedish local translation committee (LTC) will begin work on It Works: How and Why and the Step Working Guides.  We are expecting the Portuguese LTC to complete their work on Just for Today and the Step Working Guides.   In early summer, the Castillian Step Working Guides approval draft will be created.  The French speaking LTC is submitting their collection of original French personal stories for the first part two of the Basic Text that is not a translation of the original; in October, the Step Working Guides; and in November, It Works: How and Why.   And finally, the Finnish and Netherlands LTCs are in the process of proofing the typeset drafts of An Introductory Guide to Narcotics Anonymous. 

Communications Task Force   (CTF):
In keeping with our number one priority of continuously improving communications with the fellowship, the CTF workgroup met for the first time on Tuesday, 26 January.  They brought their ideas for the scope of this project and the anticipated timeline to the board for discussion.  The group is further developing the ideas that we discussed and will be developing a project plan and budget for our March meeting which will then be forwarded to the conference.  We will continue to report on the progress of this workgroup. 

Development Forum (DF):
As we stated in our December issue, the Fellowship Development Plan was developed to “plan and provide services and support which facilitate the continuation and growth of Narcotics Anonymous worldwide.”  The Development Forum continues to work with those NA communities that need funding for conference attendance.  This workgroup has had two conference calls since their last meeting.  They received an unprecedented number of requests and the board approved funding assistance for 20 communities. This decision may put us slightly over the budget approved at last year’s conference, but with the current criteria we believed that we did not have any clear direction to choose one request over another.  We plan to ask the conference to prioritize the development of criteria for this important activity for the next conference year.  As a reminder, the current criteria necessary for funding is that the area/region in question must have a service structure that services the area and/or region and must be unable to fund themselves.  We pursued a discussion concerning the functions of the DF and reviewed the orientation at the WSC to support new delegates and those from emerging communities.

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OUR UPCOMING YEAR
The WSO Management team and the Executive Committee met two weeks prior to the January board meeting in order to outline work priorities and routine services for Narcotics Anonymous World Services for the coming year.  Those results were then presented at the board meeting.

We discussed the extent of our workload, as well as the conference mandates for internal guidelines due for the CAR 2000 and at the moment, we do not feel that we, as a board, are ready to move into a committee system.  There are still several outstanding issues we need to examine before we move forward with forming committees.  We are attempting to maintain the spirit that created the World Board and are trying not to go back to the “old” system.  As stated earlier, while we are in uncharted territory, it is still our hope to maintain a cohesive and unified group that is focused on providing service to the Fellowship worldwide. 

Unified Budget/Project Proposal:
We are still very much in the middle of transitioning to a truly unified budget.  The board has taken quite a bit of time to understand its responsibilities in this area since it is unprecedented in world service history.  We expect that, as stated in the original proposal that created this new system, we will not have fully transitioned until WSC 2000. 
We adopted an outline to be used for project plans to be forwarded to the conference.  We will use this outline to develop the ideas that we forward to conference participants prior to WSC 1999. This will identify the purpose and scope of all projects that World Services is directed to complete.  It outlines a timeline, staff, and estimated costs needed for each project’s completion.  Each item was discussed to determine if a project plan was needed and if it needed to be prioritized by the conference. After a question and answer session, we moved to adopt the January to June 1999 budget proposal. 
 

Financial Update:
We reviewed the information for the calendar year 1998. There appears to be a slight increase in donations, leaving us only about $1,000 below projections for the conference budget adopted last year.   The income from literature sales was ahead of projections.  We would like to thank you all for your support.

 Marketing efforts have been very successful—correctional sales have doubled over the last year!  We also moved to integrate marketing into fixed operations and will stop addressing it as a new project.
 
 

WCNA-27:
We are still in the process of reconciling some of the records from the convention.  While WCNA-27 was the largest world convention in our history, our preliminary financial reports indicate that we did not realize the net proceeds originally projected for this event.  We now know the primary cause of additional expenses directly related to the increased size of the convention and the costs of implementing the approved logistical plan.  Without any history of a similarly sized past world convention, we either underestimated or failed completely to anticipate the extent of certain expenses.  This has been a “wake-up” call for us that will significantly change how we proceed with future conventions in NA.  Before we think about planning the conventions for Atlanta and San Diego, an in-depth examination and analysis will be completed in order to determine how we should proceed with the budget for these conventions.
 

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MIRACLES HAPPEN
There has been input from members regarding the process and content of Miracles Happen, our newly published book.  Part of the intent of the book is simply to give people an understanding of the difficulty that faced those early NA groups.  More importantly, because of these difficulties, the fact that NA was even able to get off the ground is a miracle. 

The book was produced to try to give information to the fellowship and to provide access to some of the material in the Jimmy Kinnon archives.  This was an opportunity to recapture our own history and it was not intended as service or recovery material.  It is our hope that discussions can be held at the conference that will focus on what we would like to see in the future.

WCNA-28 PROGRESS REPORT
We discussed how to proceed with the planning for this convention.  We appointed two World Board members, Claudio L. and Cary S., to work with staff in the planning for this event.

We are trying to create as much of a bilingual program as possible.  To this end, we will be creating two program workgroups, one Spanish speaking and one English speaking.  Although the leadership of the Spanish speaking program group would come from Colombia, we are discussing ways to include as many as possible of the Spanish speaking communities and Brazil in this committee.  Most of these people will be together at the WSC and the Latin American Zonal Forum, and we believe this involvement could be accomplished by notification to those communities and by using their RD’s as the contact.

We plan to produce a pre-event newsletter for distribution before WSC ’99 informing the Fellowship of the change of dates, travel plans, and safety issues with the location.  The registration flyers will then be printed in the fourth quarter of 1999 for general distribution before Christmas.
 
 

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UNITY DAY 1999
We are planning a World Services meeting in conjunction with Unity Day towards the end of September 1999. We have asked the Executive Committee to select the site.   We believe that this will allow us to plan a special Unity Day celebration and at the same time, meet with delegates to discuss our work prior to the 2000 Conference Agenda Report.

HUMAN RESOURCE PANEL
The HRP met with us on Saturday, 30 January.  We discussed the need to find a way to communicate more effectively with each other.  The panel asked Mary CV, former WSC Policy Chairperson, to join them to assist in developing the election procedures for this conference.  Between now and the end of March, the HRP will conduct phone interviews and reference checking for the WSC 2000 Co-Facilitators.  At their next meeting, HRP nominations for the Co-Facilitator positions will be finalized, WSC orientation will be discussed, complete detailed plan for conference elections will be presented, the HRP WSC report will be finalized, and detailed procedures with milestones for the next HRP will be completed.
 
 

NA NEEDS YOU!!! Here’s your opportunity to give back what was so freely given to you!!! Help build the World Pool by sending in your service résumé. Trusted servants for WS projects and elections will come from this pool. You can reach us by letter, phone, e-mail, or visit our web site at www.na.org to request your résumé form.

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OUR NEXT MEETING
Our meeting is scheduled for 18 March through 20 March.  We will discuss any outstanding items for conference week and finalize our project proposals to be presented to the conference for work during the next year.  If you have any questions, suggestions, input, etc. please send it to us as soon as possible in order for us to consider it.

Thank you again for letting us serve you and we are all looking forward to meeting with many of you in April!