Lilley Gulch Group History

The Lilley Gulch Group started out as a weekly Big Book meeting in late 1989 or early 1990. At first we did not have a regular meeting place. We just went from members house to members house on Wednesday nights. At this point we were not yet a group, just a meeting, and we did not have a name.

In April 1991 a new meeting place, Southwest Hall, opened up at Kipling and Bowles. Since many of the members of our group were also involved in starting this Meeting Hall, we decided to hold our meetings at the Hall permanently. The Hall was located in the Lilley Gulch area of Littleton, hence the name of our group.

In order to attract more members, we added two closed meetings and a beginners meeting to complement our Wednesday Big Book Study. Our core group slowly began to grow. By the middle of 1991 we registered with GSO as the Lilley Gulch Group. Michelle K. was elected as our first GSR.

As our group continued to grow, we added two more closed meetings for a total of six meetings a week ( we had decided at an early group conscience that we wanted to have only closed meetings with the exception of our beginners meeting).

In December of 1992 Mark G. was elected as our second GSR. In March of 1993, Southwest Hall lost its lease at the Kipling and Bowles location so it moved to Platte Canyon and Depew. Our group voted to move with SW Hall, even though some members were concerned that the remote location of the new site would cause us to lose some of our members. Suprisingly, our group grew quicker at the new location, and we soon had 30 to 40 regular members.

About a year later we noticed that our membership began to drop off. By the fall of 1994 we were down to around 10 - 15 regular members. The group tried several things to correct the membership problem: We changed the start time of our meetings from 6:00 pm to 7:00pm to accommodate people getting off work; we made our meetings non-smoking; and we canceled the Thursday meeting because it was not being attended.

When these ideas did not correct the problem, we conducted a group inventory, led by our newly elected GSR, Herman D.. We realized that the loss of membership was due to the fact that we were not carrying the message of AA very effectively anymore. We made a conscience effort from that point forward to ensure that we had chairpeople for all of our meetings, and that the topics of the meetings focused on recovery from alcoholism. By the summer of 1995 we were back up to around 20-25 members.

We have continuously kept our Wednesday meeting as a Big Book study and on the fourth Saturday of every month we participate in Night Watch, answering phones for the for Central Office at our members homes.