Twelve Concepts

Just as the Twelve Steps are guides for personal recovery and the Twelve Traditions are guides for group unity, the Twelve Concepts are guides for World Service. These Concepts serve as a path for Twelfth Step work on a world service level, and show how the UA groups, the World Service Conference, and the Underearners Anonymous^® General Service Board work together to carry recovery in UA to the still suffering underearner.

1. The ultimate responsibility and authority for Underearners Anonymous World Services should always remain with the collective conscience of our whole Fellowship as expressed through the UA groups.
2. The UA groups have delegated complete administrative and operational authority to the General Service Board. The groups have made the Conference the voice and conscience for the whole Fellowship, excepting for any change in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.
3. As a traditional means of creating and maintaining a clearly defined working relationship among the groups, the World Service Conference, and the Underearners Anonymous General Service Board, it is suggested that we endow these elements of world service with a traditional “Right of Decision” in order to ensure effective leadership and allow a voting representation in reasonable proportion to the responsibility that each must discharge.
4. Throughout our Conference structure, we maintain at all levels a traditional “Right of Participation,” ensuring a voting representation.
5. The traditional Rights of Appeals and Petition protect the minority opinion and ensure the consideration of personal grievances.
6. The Conference acknowledges the primary administrative responsibility of the Underearners Anonymous General Service Board.
7. The Conference recognizes that the bylaws of the Underearners Anonymous General Service Board serve as governing documents and that the Trustees have legal rights, while the rights of the Conference are spiritual, rooted in the Twelve Traditions. The Concepts are not legal instruments.
8. The Underearners Anonymous General Service Board of Trustees assumes primary leadership for larger matters of overall policy, finance, and custodial oversight, and delegates authority for routine management of General Service Office.
9. Good leaders, together with appropriate methods for choosing them at all levels, are necessary. At the World Service level, the Board of Trustees assumes primary leadership for UA as a whole.
10. Every service responsibility should be matched by an equal service authority, with the scope of such authority well defined.
11. While the Trustees hold final authority for UA World Service administration, they will be assisted by the best possible staff members and consultants. Therefore, serious care and consideration will always be given to the compensation, selection, induction to service, rotation, and assignments for special rights and duties for all staff with a proper basis for determining financial compensation.
12. The Conference of Underearners Anonymous will observe the spirit of the Traditions, taking care not to become powerful and wealthy; having sufficient operating funds with a prudent reserve; having no authority over any other members; making important decisions by discussing and voting on issues wherever possible by substantial unanimity; not acting in a punitive way; not inciting public controversy; never performing any acts of government; and finally, always remaining democratic in thought and action.