When the COVID pandemic began in early to mid-March 2020 Louisville Metro Intergroup (LMI) responded to the shut down by purchasing a virtual account that would be used for all LMI based OA meetings to continue to hold meetings for all of its members in an electronic format.
Beginning March 24, 2020 there were several meetings being held virtually to replace the meetings shut down due to COVID. By the following week, there was at least one meeting each day to support our fellowship. Volunteers stepped up and acted as hosts by committing to attend their meeting each week to ensure that the meeting was supported. Soon all previously established OA meetings were contacted to see if they would like to move their meetings to a virtual format. Some meetings decided to close for an undetermined period of time. Some new meetings were established virtually and three new AM phone meetings were established to support the needs and wants of our fellowship.
We were blessed to have already established a well-working means of communication to our membership through an email blast list. Continually through these changes we communicated the options available to our members to stay connected to others in the fellowship through this new electronic format.
LMI, as many businesses, learned that there was more than one way stay connected during this challenging time. Through these years we have again learned that we are not the same in our preferences. Although some of our members find using electronic and virtual options preferable to the time it takes to get to a meeting. Some of our members greatly prefer in-person meeting and we now have six in-person meetings per week in the Louisville Area. We also have maintained the three phone meetings a week and we have multiple options for electronic meetings for our membership. Some other lessons for us along the way:
- Some members find it much easier to attend more meetings with electronic options
- We are seeing many newcomers at in-person meetings
- We are able to reach members that are disabled and unable to attend in-person meetings
- Single parents find electronic meeting more accessible
- Hybrid meetings have not been successful so far for us but we may have more to learn in this area
- We have numerous people from other states and other countries join our meetings become close with our Louisville area members
- We are sending out Newcomer pamphlets to newcomers from other states and countries
- Initially we were not publishing our virtual info on OA.org. People had to call the contact person for get the password for the virtual/phone meeting. The LMI realized that with COVID going on for much longer than we had originally thought, not publicizing our meeting information was a deterrent for newcomers trying to find OA. We communicated this realization to our groups and all agreed to have their virtual links and info published on OA.org. Then we began getting virtual meeting bombers and established security protocols and trained host and co-hosts to handle this new challenge. Since that time, we are seeing many more newcomers in our virtual/phone meetings.
We do not know for sure what our meetings will decide to do as we continue to move out of this pandemic but LMI is committed to support the needs of our meetings and our fellowship by providing support for meetings in whichever format is needed.