The Twelve Concepts - Members AA

Guiding Principles for Service

The Twelve Concepts of Alcoholics Anonymous are the guiding principles that shape how AA’s service structure operates, ensuring accountability, leadership, and unity in carrying the message of recovery to alcoholics worldwide. These Concepts help AA stay focused on its primary purpose while ensuring that responsibility and authority are balanced at every level of service.

Written by AA co-founder Bill W. and adopted by the General Service Conference in 1962, the Concepts provide a framework for how AA’s world service structure operates.

The Concepts of Service describe the responsibilities, rights, and relationships among AA’s service bodies, members, and trustees. Together, they safeguard AA’s unity and effectiveness, and help keep our service work on a solid foundation.

Both the short form and long form provide valuable insight. The short form is a summary, while the long form explains each Concept in greater detail.

Twelve Concepts — Short Form

The Twelve Concepts for World Service in their short form state:

Final responsibility and ultimate authority for A.A. world services should always reside in the collective conscience of our whole Fellowship.
The General Service Conference of A.A. has become, for nearly every practical purpose, the active voice and the effective conscience of our whole Society in its world affairs.
To ensure effective leadership, we should endow each element of A.A. — the Conference, the General Service Board, and its service corporations, staffs, committees, and executives — with a traditional “Right of Decision.”
At all responsible levels, we ought to maintain a traditional “Right of Participation,” allowing a voting representation in reasonable proportion to the responsibility that each must discharge.
Throughout our structure, a traditional “Right of Appeal” ought to prevail, so that minority opinion will be heard and personal grievances receive careful consideration.
The Conference acknowledges the primary administrative responsibility of the Trustees.
The Charter and Bylaws of the General Service Board are legal instruments, empowering the Trustees to manage and conduct world service affairs. The Conference Charter is not a legal document; it relies on tradition and the A.A. purse for final effectiveness.
The Trustees are the principal planners and administrators of overall policy and finance. They have custodial oversight of the separately incorporated and constantly active services, exercising this through their ability to elect all directors of these entities.
Good service leadership at all levels is indispensable for our future functioning and safety. Primary world service leadership, once exercised by the founders, must necessarily be assumed by the Trustees.
Every service responsibility should be matched by an equal service authority — the scope of such authority to be always well defined, whether by tradition, by resolution, by specific job description, or by appropriate charters and bylaws.
While the Trustees hold final responsibility for A.A.’s world service administration, they should always have the assistance of the best possible committees, corporate service directors, executives, staffs, and consultants.
The Conference shall observe the spirit of A.A. tradition, taking great care that it never becomes the seat of perilous wealth or power; that sufficient operating funds and reserve be its prudent financial principle; that it place none of its members in a position of unqualified authority over others; that it reach all important decisions by discussion, vote, and, whenever possible, by substantial unanimity; that its actions never be personally punitive nor an incitement to public controversy; that it never perform acts of government; and that, like the Society it serves, it will always remain democratic in thought and action.

Twelve Concepts — Long Form

The Twelve Concepts for World Service in their long form state:

The final responsibility and the ultimate authority for A.A. world services should always reside in the collective conscience of our whole Fellowship.
The General Service Conference of A.A. has become, for nearly every practical purpose, the active voice and the effective conscience of our whole Society in its world affairs.
To insure effective leadership, we should endow each element of A.A.—the Conference, the General Service Board and its service corporations, staffs, committees, and executives—with a traditional “Right of Decision.”
At all responsible levels, we ought to maintain a traditional “Right of Participation,” allowing a voting representation in reasonable proportion to the responsibility that each must discharge.
Throughout our structure, a traditional “Right of Appeal” ought to prevail, so that minority opinion will be heard and personal grievances receive careful consideration.
On behalf of A.A. as a whole, our General Service Conference has the principal responsibility for the maintenance of our world services, and it traditionally has the final decision respecting large matters of general policy and finance. But the Conference also recognizes that the chief initiative and the active responsibility in most of these matters should be exercised primarily by the Trustee members of the Conference when they act among themselves as the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous.
The Charter and Bylaws of the General Service Board are legal instruments, empowering the trustees to manage and conduct world service affairs. The Conference Charter is not a legal document; it relies instead upon the force of tradition and the power of the A.A. purse for its final effectiveness.
The trustees are the principal planners and administrators of overall policy and finance. They have custodial oversight of the separately incorporated and constantly active services, exercising this through their ability to elect all the directors of these entities.
Good service leadership at all levels is indispensable for our future functioning and safety. Primary world service leadership, once exercised by the founders, must necessarily be assumed by the trustees.
Every service responsibility should be matched by an equal service authority, with the scope of such authority well defined.
While the trustees hold final responsibility for A.A.’s world service administration, they should always have the assistance of the best possible standing committees, corporate service directors, executives, staffs, and consultants. Therefore, the composition of these underlying committees and service boards, the personal qualifications of their members, the manner of their induction into service, the systems of their rotation, the way in which they are related to each other, the special rights and duties of our executives, staffs and consultants, together with a proper basis for the financial compensation of these special workers, will always be matters for serious care and concern.
General Warranties of the Conference: in all its proceedings, the General Service Conference shall observe the spirit of A.A. tradition, taking great care:

(a) that it never becomes the seat of perilous wealth or power;
(b) that sufficient operating funds, plus an ample reserve, be its prudent financial principle;
(c) that it place none of its members in a position of unqualified authority over others;
(d) that it reach all important decisions by discussion, vote, and whenever possible, by substantial unanimity;
(e) that its actions never be personally punitive nor an incitement to public controversy;
(f) that it never perform acts of government, and that, like the Society it serves, it will always remain democratic in thought and action.

Copyright Statement

The Twelve Concepts of Alcoholics Anonymous are reprinted with permission of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (“A.A.W.S.”).