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How it came about – a brief history of EDM
The first NA meetings in Europe were held during the late Seventies on U.S. Army bases in Germany. More meetings started in Ireland and the UK shortly afterwards, and were swiftly followed by NA communities forming in other parts of Europe. In 1983 a small group of Irish members travelled to London to attend a service meeting, and this contact led to the first European Service Conference, which was held in Trinity College, Dublin in 1984 and was attended by members from the UK, Germany and representatives from the World Service Office. This event developed into the European Convention & Conference of NA (ECCNA), which has been hosted in turn by different European communities.
It was a primarily a celebration of recovery, with some time set aside for informal reports to the floor from the attending communities. At the Convention in Lisbon in 1990, a small group was formed by members from Belgium, France, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, in order to study the possible options for a European service structure. This was known as the European Study Group, which after the ECCNA in Rome became the European Resource Group and presented its findings to the Convention two years later in Brussels.
At that meeting the Delegates recognized that in asking the question they had become one of the answers and were in fact the “Large Representative Body” option that had been described by the European Resource Group.
This body was named the European Delegates Meeting (EDM), which now meets twice yearly and is a forum of multi-lingual and multi-cultural NA communities inside and outside Europe, whose mission is to further their common welfare and unity, support their growth and help them fulfil their primary purpose of carrying the NA message to the still suffering addict. As well as serving as a forum for European NA communities, the EDM also organises and funds Fellowship Development visits to emerging NA communities to help them build their service structures and deal with local issues. The EDM is also responsible for the annual European Convention and Conference (ECCNA)
In 2005 there were more than two thousand (?) NA meetings in Europe registered with the World Service Office, and ECCNA has also grown from strength to strength.
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