ASCYPAA

ASCYPAA is the Arizona State Conference of Young People in AA.

There are YPAA - or young people's - groups all throughout the country. We define young as anyone with room for spiritual growth, so thats everyone! People in the AA community form a committee and put on these conferences. It travels from city to city within the state. The National Conference travels from state to state throughout the US.

I went to my first ASCYPAA when I had 7 months sober. We had it here in Tucson and I was on the host committee. There is so much energy at these conferences!!! They have marathon meetings and dances and games. At the main meeting on Saturday night they have a speaker who got sober young and now has a bunch of time.

Before that, they do a sobriety countdown. So they find the person or persons with the most sobriety and then find the newest newcomers. The crowd cheers for the newcomers and there's a presentation of a big book that has been signed by everyone at the conference. The energy and love for sobriety is amazing!!!

They do a roll call too, calling off cities and you stand up and cheer when your city is called. I've been to 3 of these conferences, two in AZ and one in California. They truly helped me fall in love with sobriety when I saw how much other young people had so much fun in sobriety.

So today I'm taking the girl I sponsor to Phoenix for the main meeting of this years ASCYPAA. She is sooo excited and I'm very excited for her!!! It's gonna be so amazing!!!!

Raynaadi, I hope you have a great time--it sounds awesome!

I hope you have a great time - it sounds amazing.

I was sober (first time round) when the 70'th anniversary international convention was held here in Toronto and I volunteered at it. It was amazing with so much positive energy.

Tell us all about it, when you get back.

--splitimage

We had a blast on the drive up. Talking and listening to music and being silly. We were drinking energy drinks so we kept have to stop to use the facilities haha!! At one of the stops, they had paper on the walls of the stalls that you could write on. So we drew the AA triangle on the walls haha.

We found the hotel and parked and had to find the facilities again and some of our friends were there and we felt like we got kind of a cold reception. We thought maybe it was in our head because we hadn't eaten yet so we ran out to the car and had sandwiches. After that we went to a women's panel and that was good.

After that we couldn't find anyone from Tucson. We finally stumbled on a girl who's been in and out of sobriety and she was standing by herself. So we hung out with her for a bit before she went to have dinner.

We still couldn't find anyone so we texted our friend asking where all the Tucson peeps were and he said he didn't know, and was really disappointed with the lack of Tucson unity. In the passed there have been huge groups of us at conferences. We found him in the lobby watching football and sat down for a chat. We just talked about how much the group has changed in the last year. People have moved, people have drank.

It was coming time for the main meeting and I was so excited for my sponsee to see the roll call and the sobriety countdown. But they had done the roll call on Friday.....thats where they say the name of the cities represented and you stand up and cheer. We had no idea why they did it Friday.....not everyone is there by then. The sobriety countdown even lacked energy. The whole conference did. So it was actually kind of a disappointment. It just didn't stack up to other conferences.

On the drive back we got a lot of stepwork done though, so that was cool. And we did help the newcomer at the conference, so that was excellent.

We didn't have to stop at all on the way back so that was good. We left a little after 9pm. We got back in to Tucson a little after 11 and we hear honking and look over and its one of my best friends who couldn't make it to the conference. I hardly ever see her so it was exciting to see her. Long story short, she ended up coming over and we talked until after 1 in the morning!!

So it turned out to be an excellent day even though the conference wasn't what I was expecting.

Sorry the conference wasn't that great - but it sounds like you had a pretty good time anyway.

--splitimage

Bummer about the conference, but I am glad it all worked out in the end! Things have a way of doing that...