The Following is the definition of A.A. appearing in the Fellowship's basic literature and cited frequently at meetings of A.A. groups:

Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.

The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for A.A. membership; we are self-supporting through our own contributions. A.A. is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy; neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.

Alcoholics Anonymous can also be defined as an informal society of more than 2,000,000 recovered alcoholics in the United States, Canada, and other countries. These men and women meet in local groups, which range in size from a handful in some localities to many hundreds in larger communities.

Currently, women make up 35 percent of the total membership.

The relative success of the A.A. program seems to be due to the fact that an alcoholic who no longer drinks has an exceptional faculty for "reaching" and helping an uncontrolled drinker.

In simplest form, the A.A. program operates when a recovered alcoholic passes along the story of his or her own problem drinking, describes the sobriety he or she has found in A.A., and invites the newcomer to join the informal Fellowship.

The heart of the suggested program of personal recovery is contained in Twelve Steps describing the experience of the earliest members of the Society:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become      unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we      understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our     wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to      them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so      would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly         admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with        God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the        power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry        this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

During its first decade, A.A. as a fellowship accumulated substantial experience which indicated that certain group attitudes and principles were particularly valuable in assuring survival of the informal structure of the Fellowship. In 1946, in the Fellowship’s international journal, the A.A. Grapevine, these principles were reduced to writing by the founders and early members as the Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous. They were accepted and endorsed by the membership as a whole at the International Convention of A.A., at Cleveland, Ohio, in 1950.

1. Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A.     unity.

2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority — a loving God as He     may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted     servants; they do not govern.

3. The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.

4. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.

5. Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic     who still suffers.

6. An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance or lend the A.A. name to any related     facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property and prestige divert     us from our primary purpose.

7. Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.

8. Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service     centers may employ special workers.

9. A.A., as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or     committees directly responsible to those they serve.

10. Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name       ought never be drawn into public controversy.

11. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need       always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.

12. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to       place principles before personalities.

The Twelve Concepts of AA do for AA as a world-wide organizations what the 12 Steps do for personal recovery and what the 12 Traditions do for harmonious and effective functioning of AA Groups. (More information about AA's 12 Steps and 12 Traditions can be found in the AA books, Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.)

The 12 Concepts for World Service provide the framework within which AA as a world-wide organization functions. The 12 Concepts are listed below in "short form." For a detailed explanation on how they operate, obtain a copy of the AA book, The A.A. Service Manual combined with Twelve Concepts for World Service by Bill W., 1997-1998 Edition.

1. Final responsibility and ultimate authority for A.A. world services should always     reside in the collective conscience of our whole Fellowship.

2. 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     world affairs.

3. 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."

4. 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.

5. Throughout our structure, a traditional "Right of Appeal" ought to prevail, so that     minority opinion will be heard and personal grievances receive careful     consideration.

6. The Conference recognizes that the chief initiative and active responsibility in     most world service matters should be exercised by the trustee members of the     Conference acting as the General Service Board.

7. 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 upon tradition and the     A.A.purse for final effectiveness.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. Every service responsibility should be matched by an equal service authority,       with the scope of such authority well defined.

11. The trustees should always have the best possible committees, corporate       service directors, executives, staffs, and consultants. Composition, qualification,       induction procedures, and the rights and duties will always be matters of serious       concern.

12. The Conference shall observe the spirit of AA. tradition, taking 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.

From The A.A. Service Manual combined with Twelve Concepts for World Service by Bill W., 1997-1998 Edition, preceding the introduction to the 12 Concepts.

AA's Three Legacies in the words of Bill Wilson, AA's Co-founder.

Q - What do the Three Legacies of AA represent?

Bill Wilson: The three legacies of AA - recovery, unity and service in a sense represent three impossibilities, impossibilities that we know became possible, and possibilities that have now borne this unbelievable fruit. Old Fitzmayo, one of the early AA's and I visited the Surgeon General of the United States in the third year of this society and told him of our beginnings. He was a gentle man, Dr. Lawrence Kolb and has since become a great friend of AA. He said, "I wish you well. Even the sobriety of a few is almost a miracle. The government knows that this is one of the greatest health problems but we have considered the recovery of alcoholics so impossible that we have given up and have instead concluded that rehabilitation of narcotic addicts would be the easier lob to tackle."

Such was the devastating impossibility of our situation. Now, what has been brought to bear upon this impossibility that it has become possible? First, the grace of Him who presides over all of us. Next, the cruel lash of John Barleycorn who said. "this you must do, or die." Next, the intervention of God through friends, at first a few and now legion! who opened to us, who in the early days were uncommitted, the whole field of human ideas. morality and religion, from which we could choose.

These have been the wellsprings of the forces and ideas and emotions and spirit which were first fused into our Twelve Steps for recovery. Some of us act well, but no sooner had a few got sober than the old forces began to come into play in us rather frail people. They were fearsome, the old forces, the drive for money, acclaim, prestige.

Would these forces tear us apart? Besides, we came from every walk of life. Early, we had begun to be a cross-section of all men and women, all differently conditioned, all so different and yet happily so alike in our kinship of suffering. Could we hold in unity? To those few who remain who lived in those earlier times when the Traditions were being forged in the school of hard experience on its thousands of anvils, we had our very, very dark moments.

It was sure recovery was in sight, but how could there be recovery for many? Or how could recovery endure if we were to fall into controversy and so into dissolution and decay?

Well, the spirit of the Twelve Steps which have brought us release from one of the grimmest obsessions known -- obviously, this spirit and these principles of retaining grace had to be the fundamentals of our unity. But in order to become fundamental to our unity, these principles had to be spelled out as they applied to the most prominent and the most grievous of our problems.

So. out of experience came the need to apply the spirit of our steps to our lives of working and living together. These were the forces that generated the Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But, we had to have more than cohesion. Even for survival, we had to carry the message and we had to function. In fact, that had become evident in the Twelve Steps themselves for the last one enjoins us to carry the message. But lust how would we carry this message? How would we communicate, we few, with those myriad's who still don't know? And how would this communication be handled? How could we do these things. how could we authorize these things in such a way that in this new, hot focus of effort and ego that we would not again be shattered by the forces that had once ruined our lives?

. This was the problem of the Third Legacy. From the vital Twelfth Step call right up through our society to its culmination today. And, again, many of us said: "This can't be done. It's all very well for Bill and Bob and a few friends to set up a Board of Trustees and to provide us with some literature, and look after our public relations and do all of those chores for us that we can't do for ourselves. This is fine, but we can't go any further than that. This is a job for our elders, for our parents. In this direction only, can there be simplicity and security.

And then came the day when it was seen that the parents were both fallible and perishable and Dr. Bob's hour struck and we suddenly realized that this ganglion, this vital nerve center of World Service, would lose its sensation the day the communication between an increasingly unknown Board of Trustees and you was broken. Fresh links would have to be forged. And at that time many of us said: This is impossible, this is too hard. Even in transacting the simplest business, providing the simplest of services, raising the minimum amounts of money, these excitements to us, in this society so bent on survival have been almost too much locally. Look at our club brawls. My God, if we have elections countrywide and Delegates come down here and look at the complexity - thousands of group representatives, hundreds of committeemen, scores of Delegates - my God, when these descend on our parents, the Trustees, what is going to happen then? It won't be simplicity :it can't be. Our experience has spelled it out.

But there was the imperative, the must, and why was there an imperative? Because we had better have some confusion, some politicking, than to have utter collapse of this center.

That was the alternative and that was the uncertain and tenuous ground on which the General Service Conference was called into being.

I venture, in the minds of many and sometimes in mine that the Conference could be symbolized by a great prayer and a faint hope. This was the state of affairs in 1945 to 1950. Then came the day when some of us went up to Boston to watch an assembly elect by two-thirds vote or lot a Delegate. Prior to assembly, I consulted all the local politicos and those very wise Irishmen in Boston said, "we're going to make your prediction Bill, you know us temperamentally, but we're going to say that this thing is going to work." That was the biggest piece of news and one of the mightiest assurances that I had up to this time that there could be any survival for these services.

Well, work it has and we have survived another impossibility. Not only have we survived the impossibility, we have so far transcended it that there can be no return in future years to the old uncertainties, come what perils there may.

Now, as we have seen in this quick review, the spirit of the Twelve Steps was applied in specific terms to our problems of living and working together. This developed the Twelve Traditions. In turn, the Twelve Traditions were applied to this problem of functioning at world levels in harmony and unity. (10th GSC©, April, 1960)