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First Things First
You don’t need to be an "expert" or have years of perfect recovery to start and help maintain a DRA Group and its meetings.
If you are interested in starting a DRA Group and holding DRA meetings, download or send for the Dual Recovery Anonymous Meeting Start-up Guide. In it is a great deal of the basic information and documents required to run a DRA meeting.
If there are other DRA meetings in your area you may want to ask their secretary or chairperson who started their meeting. See if you can schedule a time to speak with them about your plans. They will usually be glad to offer suggestions and tell you the steps they took to get their meeting off the ground.
Groups grow and evolve and we know of many DRA Groups that were started by people who had never before started or ran a 12 Step meeting of any kind. It is helpful to have a basic understanding of the Steps and Traditions. The 12 Traditions are the basic guiding principles for our Groups, meetings, and service work committees. Any two people who are interested in personal dual recovery may get together and hold a DRA meeting. Once they decide to invite others to join them and continue to hold meetings they can decide to become a DRA Group. DRA Groups hold DRA meetings. Meetings are a function of the Group. A DRA Group may have more than one meeting a week. Some Groups hold several throughout the week and some have just one a week.
If you have never before attended a 12 Step type meeting it would probably be very helpful to locate and attend a local 12 Step Anonymous meeting of some sort a few times to get the feel of how they are run. You may also find it interesting to read our description of what a DRA meeting is like from our document called, "Your First DRA Meeting"