Development
In 1968 members of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) who believed that their financial difficulties were caused by an addictive disease not unlike alcoholism founded an organization named Penny Pinchers, which they later renamed Capital Builders. The founding members believed their financial problems stemmed from an inability to save money, and they practiced making daily deposits to their savings accounts. Later they recognized their problems were not caused by an inability to save but rather an inability to stay solvent.
In early 1971 the group members came to believe that incurring unsecured debt was the threshold of their disease and committed to a rigorous twelve-step approach to prevent incurring further unsecured debt. The original group disbanded and meetings were not consistently held again until 1976, when a group of two or three people began meeting regularly on Wednesdays in the rectory of St. Stephen's Church in New York City. Within a year a second group formed and Debtors Anonymous continued to grow. The first General Service Conference was held in 1987 in the auditorium at Saint Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in Manhattan. As of 2009 there were 512 groups meeting worldwide.
DA assiduously adapted AA's format, making only five changes to AA's Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions: "D.A." and "Debtors Anonymous" replaces "A.A." and "Alcoholics Anonymous", "debt" replaces "alcoholism", "compulsive debtors" replaces "alcoholics", "incurring unsecured debt" replaces "drinking", and "debtor" replaces "alcoholic." In 2002 DA published a list of 12 promises similar to the 12 promises appearing on pages 83–84 of Alcoholics Anonymous. DA's original literature includes the Twelve Tools of Debtors Anonymous, a list of practices to recovery from compulsive debting.
Read more about this topic: Debtors Anonymous
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.”
—Gail Sheehy (20th century)
“Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.”
—Benito Mussolini (1883–1945)
“The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)