Debtors Anonymous
started in 1968 when a core group of recovery members from Alcoholics
Anonymous held their first meeting to discuss the problems they
were experiencing with money. They first called themselves the
"Penny Pinchers" and later "Capital Builders".
The members of this group made daily deposits of their funds
into savings accounts because they believed that their financial
problems stemmed from an inability to save money.
As days and months
passed, the group's members began to understand that their monetary
problems did not stem from an inability to save, but rather from the inability to become solvent. By 1971, the essence
of the D.A. Program unfolded in the discovery and understanding
that the act of debting itself was the threshold of this disease,
and the only solution was to use the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics
Anonymous.
After two years the
group of recovering A.A. members disbanded. Meetings came and
went. D.A. reemerged in 1976 when two or three people began
meeting on Wednesday evenings at St. Stephen's Rectory in New
York. Within the year, a second meeting was organized, and Debtors
Anonymous was reborn. Today, there are over 500 meetings in
the United States and in 13 countries throughout the world.
