The Knowledge Series: The AA Traditions

by Adam Alexander

Several of the tenets of what was to become AA's Twelve Traditions were first expressed in the Foreword to the First Edition of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1939. By 1944 the number of AA groups had grown along with the number of letters being sent to the AA headquarters in New York asking how to handle disputes caused by issues like publicity, religion, and finances. By 1946 AA cofounder Bill Wilson had more clearly formulated the basic ideas for the Twelve Traditions directly from such correspondence with groups (via the group conscience method), setting guidelines on how groups and members should interact with each other, the public, and AA as a whole. The Traditions were first published in the April 1946 AA Grapevine under the title Twelve Points to Assure Our Future and were formally adopted at AA's First International Convention in 1950. Wilson's book on the subject, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, was published in April, 1953. This book presents an illustrated presentation of these traditions.

14 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 8, 2015

About the author

Adam Alexander is a consummate story-teller thanks to forty years as a successful and award-winning film and television producer. His films have included documentaries about little-known cultures, (A Year in Tibet), popular food series, (Return to Tuscany, The Urban Chef) and gardening programmes, (A Year at Kew, A Garden for Eden). He has won awards for culturally important ethnographic series including, Hughesovka, Eutopia, Unholy Land and Russian Wonderland.

Adam’s true passion is collecting rare, endangered but above all, delicious vegetables from around the world. He lectures widely on his work discovering and conserving rare, endangered garden crops. He is a Board Member of the national charity Garden Organic. His knowledge and expertise growing out vegetables for seed is highly valued by the Heritage Seed Library, for which he is a seed guardian. He shares seeds with other growers and gene banks in the EU, the USA and Canada. He is currently growing out seed of heritage Syrian and Ukrainian vegetables for displaced people.

He has appeared on CNN’s Going Green, BBC’s Gardeners’ World and The Great British Food Revival. He has written for The Organic Way, The Sustainable Food Trust, The Cottage Garden Society, Simple Things. He is currently working with The Museum of Wales, St. Fagans reviving Welsh heritage vegetables and has provided heirloom Welsh vegetable seed to culturally important gardens including Aberglassney in West Wales. He is in demand as a consultant and advisor to private gardens and institutions wanting to showcase British heritage crops.