'03 LifeRing Congress Elects
Four to Board of Directors

Meeting in Brooksville Florida over the Feb. 28 - March 2 weekend, the 2003 LifeRing Congress re-elected two old Board members and elected two new ones. Joining the Board for the first time are Gillian Ellenby of LifeRing San Francisco and Chet Gardiner of LifeRing Oakland. Returning to the Board are Diane Jeanette of New Haven CT and Paula Bryder of LifeRing Tampa. They replace outgoing Board members Tom Shelley, Marjorie Jones, and Bill Somers.

Gillian has more than four years clean and sober. She was one of the original members of the first San Francisco LifeRing meeting in January 1999, and was its second convenor. She currently convenes the Thursday night meeting at the historic Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. She is an experienced LifeRing presenter. She led the workshop on Changing The Public’s Perception Of The Recovering Person at the 2002 Congress. Gillian is a successful businesswoman, a real estate developer and space designer, an AutoCad user, as well as a visual artist with a unique style that combines verbal and pictorial expressions. A native of Scotland, Gillian served as secretary for most of the recent Congress sessions. The newly constituted Board wasted no time electing her as Board secretary. She was elected to a two-year term.

Chet first came to many LifeRing members' attention through his music. He was part of the trio that entertained banqueters at the 1999 convention in Berkeley, and made a deep impression with his solo "I Feel Like Hank Williams Tonight." His band was the high point of the entertainment at the 2002 congress. Before very long it became clear that Chet was not only a serious musician but also a serious LifeRing convenor. He took over and for many months led the Wednesday 6:30 pm Oakland meeting. After about a year off to pay a debt to society incurred during his drinking life, Chet returned and started the Pleasanton meeting. He is coming up to his four-year anniversary. He has been a frequent LifeRing presenter, both with and without his acoustic guitar. He is a former Annapolis cadet. His day job for the past 30 years has been as computer programmer, specializing in FoxPro. He was elected to a full three-year term.

Diane is a former director who now rejoins the Board after a hiatus of more than two years. Diane has been active for many years in the LifeRing online communities, including LSRmail, the Women's list, the lsrcon list, and others. She is known for her analytical writing. She has two years clean and sober. She is widely read in the recovery literature and is a frequent book reviewer in the BookTalk section of www.unhooked.com. Her essay on the Just-One Genie, in the Keepers book published by LifeRing Press, has become a classic. She was elected to a full three-year term.

Paula Bryder is the founder and convenor of the LifeRing meeting in Tampa, one of the oldest meetings of its kind in the country. She is one of the oldest members of the LSRmail list and has been a respected leading voice in LifeRing and its predecessor for many years. She has more than two years clean and sober. She organized the '03 Congress in Brooksville almost single-handedly, pulling together the hundreds of details that go into this kind of event. Her story is included in the Keepers volume. Paula was elected to a one-year term.

The Congress gave a standing ovation to retiring Board member Tom Shelley. Tom was one of the founding directors of LifeRing in 1997 and has served on the Board continuously since that time, and was its Secretary. He is founder and listmeister of the LSRmail list, and convenes the St. Petersburg LifeRing meeting.

Outgoing Board member Marjorie Jones will remain as Chief Financial Officer. A resident of Oakland, she founded the Sunday Oakland Lifering meeting and currently convenes the Friday night Berkeley meeting and moderates three major LifeRing email lists. She has been responsible for LifeRing finances and has presented the annual Financial Reports to the Congresses. She is an experienced LifeRing presenter, and was a principal organizer of all three national LifeRing conventions in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Outgoing Board member Bill Somers is the unofficial poet laureate of Lifering and his poem is part of the
green "Sobriety is Our Priority" brochure that we distribute by the thousands. Bill started the first LifeRing meeting that runs successfully side by side with 12-step meetings in the same time slot at a treatment
center. He has frequently presented LifeRing in Oakland and other venues. He also obtained the first (and so far only) corporate contribution to LifeRing, a $200 donation from his employer. He chaired the entertainment committee at both of the recent SF Bay Area Congresses. He lives in Vacaville CA and continues active as convenor of the new meetings in Fairfield and in Vacaville.

Continuing Board members Jacquelyn Jones, Robert Bradley, and Marty Nicolaus round out the current seven-member Board of Directors. Board members must be active LifeRing members in recovery from a substance addiction and must have at least two years continuous clean and sober time. The Board meets face to face once a year at the annual Congress and online in a chat room at other times during the year. Names, email addresses and snail mail addresses of current Board members are posted on the convenor page of www.unhooked.com. Directors are always glad to hear from members and usually happy to bring member concerns and issues to Board meetings. Board meetings are generally open to the membership.  -- Marty N.

Margherita and I arrived at UU in the Pines around 5 p.m. on Friday. The camp is only 6 miles from the interstate, and about one mile from a 4-lane highway, but it feels very secluded. It's wooded, with trees that looked very exotic to me, especially with the drapings of Spanish Moss. There are bird sounds that could have come from the "Ramar of the Jungle" tv show I watched as a kid. There's a winding stream on the property and plantings of various bushes and flowers, none of which I could identify. The three buildings (plus some smaller out-buildings) are ramshackle and very reminiscent of summer camps everywhere. The buildings are close together, so we were never far from each other unless we consciously retreated to our rooms - and even those were shared with others.
Meals were eaten communally and the dining area became the hang-out of choice for many of the non-smokers. The smokers preferred the area just outside that room, so there was easy interplay. The Congress brought home the futility of any effort to make LSR "smoke free" any time soon, since a high percentage of the delegates were puffers.
I managed to miss the first real meeting of the Congress, on Saturday morning. It was for discussion of a draft of a new edition of the Convenors' Handbook, written by Marty. I know there were grumblings that a 4 page list of the basics of organizing a meeting would have been more useful, but if I ever try to start a F2F group, I'll want all the help I can get, so I thought the full-length book was a useful tool. As usual, too, there were mutterings about Marty imposing his own view of things into the book. He does do that, of course, but until some more "objective" writer comes forward with a useful alternative, I'm not sure what his critics have in mind as an alternative, except some sort of censorship of him.
Anyway, I was wandering the grounds with Fireman Jack during that meeting, having a better time than most, I suspect. After lunch there was another meeting, listed on the agenda as something innocuous. It turned out to be the beginning of the real work of the Congress, dealing with suggested resolutions and bylaw changes. I had offered to be parliamentarian for the meetings, since I figured it would be an easy job and would force me to pay attention, which, since I wasn't a delegate, might not otherwise be easy. I was surprised that we were getting serious so early, and hadn't even brought my copy of Roberts' Rules of Order, or a pen.
That surprise was nothing compared to what happened next. Paula started the meeting by announcing she wanted me to be the Chair [I received several stern lectures about not using the term "Chairman"]. Tom didn't feel well and, I guess, Paula wanted to mix it up in the debates, so she figured a non-delegate who knew how to run a meeting would be a good solution. I had a brief, but very intense, "YIKES!" moment. If the meeting descended into fighting, the person in the middle would likely be pummeled by both sides.
Fortunately, the delegates made things easy by mostly staying on-topic and never getting personal or vitriolic. We plowed through the proposed resolutions and amendments without much trouble. Richard's proposal for expanding LSRmail representation provoked considerable debate and he wisely, in my opinion, elected to withdraw it in favor of a committee to study the matter and work out the problems identified in the debate. Mona's series of bylaw amendments intended to establish an interim, on-line Congress was set for discussion on Sunday.
I felt good heading the meeting. I'm not a leader in the way that Marty is - assertive, sometimes charismatic, sometimes maddening - but give me a task where what I'm to do is well-defined and I do fine.
The Saturday afternoon meeting ended abruptly when Tom announced that he was resigning as a member of the Board. This came as a real shock, since Tom is universally beloved and has been with LSR from the beginning. There were a couple of moments of stunned yammering, but that ended when Robert pointed out in his inimical style that Tom wasn't dying, for god's sake. That comment broke the tension, but the meeting was clearly over.
Tom's resignation meant that there would now be three new Board members selected, out of seven. And one of the other Board members had only been there for less than a year. I felt that this sort of turnover in the Board created a dangerous situation for LSR, even though all the people involved were good and competent. Institutional memory and continuity is important and groups can go off the rails more easily when turnover in leadership gets too high. This is especially true if there is factionalism and dissent in the air. Perhaps this analyses is wrong, but it's what I felt on Saturday evening.
So, even though I wasn't a delegate and, even as Chair of the meeting, had no authority, I decided to engage in a little back-room politics. I asked Richard to join me and we went out to the smoke-filled patio and approached Mona about the possibility of withdrawing her amendments in favor of a committee, headed by her, to study the issues and massage her proposal into a more palatable form. My argument was that such a move would prevent anybody from feeling "defeated" at a time when LSR was particularly fragile. Richard had instinctively, I think, seen that his proposal was divisive in the form that had been presented and he had withdrawn it in order to try to build a stronger consensus. I suggested that Mona do the same.
I've made myself sound kind of smart about all this in this report, but I was having a hell of a time "closing the sale" with Mona. Not because she was being unreasonable at all, but just because I wasn't doing well in answering her concerns. I'd make a lousy lawyer. But then Diane wandered by at the perfect moment. She grasped the situation instantly and, with the analytic skill she's known for, offered impeccable arguments in support of my rather half-baked idea. Diane would make a great lawyer! Mona was persuaded and agreed to forming a committee for further study and the chances of a very divisive meeting on Sunday dropped substantially.
So on Sunday, after discussion of Mona's substitute motion for a committee, her revised plan was adopted and peace and harmony descended. For about five minutes. Then it was time for electing Board members. There were four nominees for three seats and, this being a Florida election, things didn't go well. Each delegate was supposed to vote for three people, but one person, no doubt seriously sleep-deprived by this point, managed to vote twice for one person and once for another. And the race was tight enough so that the decision on what to do about that ballot would affect the outcome. At first, I thought the ballot should be thrown out (the Bush solution), but I eventually realized that there should be a re-vote (the Gore solution). Roberts' Rules was, incidentally, of little help.
The re-vote took place and, of course, led to a tie for the final seat on the Board. So there was a third vote for the last seat and, at last, the election - and the official work of the Congress - was concluded.
-- Craig W
 

The main things [about the ’03 Congress] I recall that have not already been reported here are that it was decided:
1.) To conduct a membership survey, in order to find out more about LSR members, their needs, numbers, preferences, etc.
2.) To form a committee to develop guidelines for handling media requests, and for media outreach. The consensus is that we need to investigate new ways of getting the word out about LSR.
Although there was a billed workshop involving Marty's Handbook, we ran out of time and there was no real discussion of the book at the conference. Marty solicited comments to be sent to him privately, but I am not so sure that is a satisfactory substitute for public comment, so I suppose that issue remains open.
I know that many people expected a donnybrook, but there was a complete absence of any such thing. I believe there were some factions and tensions, but they seemed to dissipate as time went on.
Most people know that tempers frayed and divisions developed over the last year, first as a consequence of a controversy over LSR's position on smoking, and then over a few other issues. My overall impression was that there was a lot of (gag alert) *healing* that went on. I have no illusions of "peace in our time," but unless I miss my guess there will be a lot fewer acrimonious debates this year than last. There will be much work and discussion in the various committees that will be formed, but I am extremely hopeful that folks who saw each other as on opposite sides of a divide do not see it like that to the same extent now.
I also think that at this meeting we went some distance towards achieving one of my goals going in, and that was to establish the Delegate's Assembly as a powerful and meaningful deliberative body that truly decides things. Even the election, which might seem like it would be a sore subject for me, was positive in that regard in that there were more candidates than seats, so there was a true democratic selection process and not just a ratification of a choice someone else had made.
I am hopeful that some people that went into this deeply distrusting one another came out of it with at least some grounds for greater respect, if not total agreement. I know that I did.
My sense is that there was no general agreement going into this meeting as to what exactly a Congress should do. I think that is still a little fuzzy. There is clearly a balance to be struck between a Congress that tries to do too much and falls into fruitless wrangling over minutia, and a Congress that just listens to the reports of the officers, votes on uncontested Board seats, and doesn't initiate anything itself.
Maybe this Congress tried to do too much, and it was certainly a challenge getting through the agenda, but I am hopeful we've all learned something from this, and have a better sense of what is and isn't an effective way to proceed.
To me the Congress has two main purposes, each equally important. The first is business, but the second is social. There is currently no other gathering of LSR folk from far and wide, so if you want to meet people you either take your own initiative, or you travel to the Congress and do it there. Sometimes the social and the business goals conflicted a bit, but my sense is that there was decent balance at this meeting. Sitting in a circle and debating something may not be an ideal social setting, but there were many laughs even during the most tedious of discussions.
That's about the extent of any report I'm going to make. And, as we know, nothing is truly "official" in LSR but the Bylaws (smile). – Rich CBT