Affiliation Matters: Strengthening Recovery Together

Welcome to the Virtual Region of Overeaters Anonymous. As an unaffiliated meeting, within the Virtual Region, your presence is vital in helping members find recovery. We are here to serve you.

Since your meeting is part of the Virtual Region, there is a vital opportunity to take the next step: affiliating with one of the Virtual Region’s intergroups, a specific-focus service board, or even forming your own intergroup.

Why Affiliate with a Service Body?

Affiliating with a service body offers numerous benefits, including:

  • Enhanced Resources: Ability to access workshops, training, and materials tailored to support recovery and to strengthen your meeting.

  • Stronger Representation: Ensuring your meeting has a voice in OA’s collective decisions, shaping the fellowship’s direction.

  • Fellowship Connection: Sharing experience, strength, and hope with like-minded groups.

  • Opportunities for Service: Encouraging  recovery by engaging in meaningful service roles. Service provides us the opportunity to put the Principles, Traditions, and Concepts into practice.

By affiliating, you’re not just supporting your meeting—you’re contributing to the strength and unity of the Virtual Region, our service bodies, and to the entire OA Fellowship.

Affiliation gives your meeting a direct voice and vote in the fellowship.

Your voice matters and is a vital part of Overeaters Anonymous unity and service, as expressed through our Traditions and Concepts.

Through affiliation, your meeting may participate in the Agenda Questionnaire, which helps shape the agenda for the World Service Business Conference (WSBC) — the annual business meeting where the membership conducts OA’s annual business through the group conscience process, including voting on bylaws, policies, procedures, and new business motions.

Affiliation also allows your meeting to express its voice on motions that will come before the Region Assembly. Input from affiliated meetings is carried through intergroups so that intergroup representatives, serving as Region Assembly Representatives, may share the experience, strength, hope, and viewpoints of the meetings they serve when matters are discussed at the Assembly.

In addition, affiliation provides eligible members of your meeting the opportunity to stand for service, including election as an intergroup Representative, a Region Assembly Delegate / Representative, or a World Service Business Conference Delegate, in accordance with OA policies and procedures.

Support from the Virtual Region, and intergroup you affiliate with, can assist with:

  1. Conflict Resolution: Intergroups can serve as a source or a service structure that may assist in resolving disagreements that individual meetings or members cannot resolve through their group-conscience or through their business meeting processes.
  2. Disruptive Behavior: Support that can help address concerns about members who consistently disrupt meetings, ensuring the group can maintain its focus and function.
  3. Member Support and Safety: Intergroups provide support in addressing situations where members face harassment, inappropriate solicitation to join outside organizations, or disruptions by intruders in a variety of virtual platforms. Intergroups assist in establishing best practices and protocols to ensure the safety and integrity of meetings.
  4. Connection to Regions: Since regions often cannot maintain direct, ongoing contact with every meeting, intergroups serve as an important part of the service structure, providing localized support and ensuring that issues are brought to the region when necessary or for the right of appeal.
  5. Conducting Group Inventories: Meetings find it effective to occasionally conduct an inventory for the renewal of the meeting or to address problems. Just as we find it necessary to conduct personal inventories, to clear away the wreckage of our past, or renew our recovery, this process is valuable to intergroups and meetings as well. The Virtual Region, and its twenty-three intergroups and three service boards, provide structure and training for renewal and for the inventory process.
  6. Support by the Virtual Region and Virtual Region Intergroup Committees:

     The Virtual Region, Virtual Region Service bodies and our committees design programs to support members of affiliated and unaffiliated meetings in carrying the message. The intergroup and service board structures facilitate collective collaboration and provide training for meeting leaders and intergroup officers. The training is then made available to meetings and includes initiatives, such as Carry the Message events, workshops to support the study of the Steps and Traditions, Unity with Diversity programs, outreach efforts, carry-the-message campaigns, newcomer open houses, training for sponsors, and Zoom training.  

    Affiliation doesn’t just matter to your meeting—it matters to all of us. Joining a service body strengthens the Virtual Region as a whole, enhances our intergroup and service boards, and supports the recovery of every member. We experience this unity in our newcomer open houses, conventions, workshops and committees.  Together we Recover.

Options for Affiliation

Ways your meeting can affiliate and strengthen its connection to the fellowship:

  1. Join an existing intergroup:

    Explore one of the 23 intergroups or 3 service boards in the Virtual Region. Find a service body that aligns with your meeting’s focus and needs.  https://oavirtualregion.org/vr-intergroups/ , https://oavirtualregion.org/vr-service-boards/

  • Form a New Intergroup or service board.
  • If your meeting shares a specific focus, or a common interest with another unaffiliated meeting, consider forming a new intergroup. It only takes a minimum of two meetings to form an intergroup.
  • Explore Geographic Intergroups/Service board: If your members feel a connection to a geographic region, rather than to the Virtual Region, we can help you find intergroups in your area.
  •  Virtual meetings may affiliate with a geographic intergroup or region. Find your OA Home! 

We’re Here to Serve You

Our Region’s Intergroup Outreach Committee, Chair, and Trustee are ready to assist you. If need be, we can arrange a virtual visit to your meeting to discuss these options and answer your questions.

Affiliation strengthens the collective recovery of the Virtual Region, our service bodies, and your meeting’s members. Together, we carry the message of recovery to those who still suffer.

Contact Us Today!

Thank you for your service to OA and your commitment to recovery.