What is the difference between an Alcoholics Anonymous clubhouse and an Alcoholics Anonymous center?

In Alcoholics Anonymous, there are no facilities officially known as clubhouses or centers. There are, however, unofficial gathering places (often informally called club houses), open to anyone who claims membership in AA, and their function is essentially to be a gathering place at times that don’t coincide with regular group meeting times.

AA is represented and serviced by an entity called the General Services Office; essentially the warehouse of materials and data for AA worldwide. Within all the states and about 180 countries of the world, there are AA Districts that cluster individual AA groups for accounting and representation.

The individual ‘Group’ is the most important part of AA (the grass roots of the program, really) and consists of memberships of varying sizes that have come into being as a result of the willingness of the members to join.

A Central Office (perhaps the ‘center’ to which you refer) is the hub for groups within a district, the primary function of which is to be a referral guide for newcomers finding a group to join, as well as providing literature and other materials necessary for Group day to day functioning. Please refer to the site here for further info:

http://www.aa.org/

I do hope this is of help to you.

Thanks robboy, but what I speak of are recovery facilities that are called Centers - in these centers many meeting take place. Technically how are they different from the clubhouses which basically serve the same role?

'What we've got here is failure to communicate.' Sorry, just a little of my brand of humor. But what you DO have are two totally different concepts crashing into one another, mbl. Recovery Centers are to AA what you might say kindergarten is to education: They start the process, and the rest is up to the individual. AA's primary purpose is to carry its message to those that still suffer from alcoholism. Recovery centers (and we're only talking about alcoholism here) are comprehensive facilities that cater to those that seek initial and/or emergency medical assistance, and usually follow up by longer-term recovery instruction and therapy. AA has no such facilities for this type of assistance, it being a strictly voluntary program of mutual support for ongoing sobriety. Recovery centers do indeed have regular meetings, many of which are AA sponsored in an effort to introduce people to their program for recovery, but the two entities have little else to do with each other beyond that. The AA 'club house', as I've said, is strictly for the use of its members, while the meetings held in recovery centers are usually mandatory and rehabilitative in nature, and don't really serve the same roles.

If you’d be interested in more comprehensive info on AA or its relationship within the community, please feel free to send me a message, and we can take up less ink here.