Online and Hybrid A.A. Meetings in New York: How to Find One and What to Expect

Last reviewed: July 2026

In the spring of 2020 every meeting in New York moved onto Zoom in about a week. Most of them have since moved back into church basements and community rooms, but a lot did not, and a lot of others now run both at once. Six years on, online meetings are no longer a stopgap. They are a permanent part of how A.A. works in this state, with their own habits and their own awkwardnesses.

If you have never joined one, the practical questions are usually the same. Where do you find them, does anyone see your face, and what happens in the first five minutes.

The three ways a meeting can exist now

Schedules use the words loosely, which causes a fair amount of confusion, so it helps to know what you are looking at.

An in-person meeting is what it sounds like. People in a room. No link, and often no listing beyond the local schedule.

An online meeting has no physical location at all. It exists on Zoom or something similar, the group is scattered across whatever geography it happens to be scattered across, and the meeting ID is the address. Some of these are attached to a New York district or intergroup by history. Others belong to nowhere in particular.

A hybrid meeting runs in a room and on a screen at the same time, usually with a laptop set up at the front table. These started as a way to keep members who were sick or housebound from dropping out, and they stayed. They are also the format most likely to have technical trouble, because somebody in the room has to remember to bring the laptop and point the camera at whoever is talking.

Where to look

For New York meetings tied to a place, the schedules on this site are the starting point. Every area and intergroup keeps its own list, and most of them now mark the format next to the time. Notation varies. You will see a link icon, or the word ONLINE, or an abbreviation like OL or H for hybrid, depending on who maintains the list.

The Meeting Guide app, which A.A. World Services supports and which is free on both iPhone and Android, pulls from those same local schedules and shows what is nearby and what is starting soon. It is the fastest tool if you are traveling around the state and do not know the local landscape.

For online-only meetings, the Online Intergroup of A.A. keeps the largest directory at aa-intergroup.org. You can filter by time, language and format, and there is always something running, including at four in the morning when the local options have run out. This matters more than it sounds. Night shift workers, people with newborns and anyone lying awake at a bad hour have somewhere to go that did not exist before 2020.

Meetings also disappear without warning. A group that met on Zoom for two years quietly stops, and the listing survives it by several months. If a link does not work, the local intergroup phone line usually knows what happened.

What actually happens when you join

You click the link. Depending on how the group has it set up, you land in a waiting room for a few seconds while somebody admits you, and then you are looking at a grid of faces, or at names on black rectangles, or some mix.

The meeting itself runs close to how it runs in a room. Someone chairs, reads the preamble, asks whether there are newcomers, and either calls on people or opens the floor. Most meetings are an hour. Crosstalk is discouraged the same way it is in person. The chair mutes people who forget to mute themselves, and about once a meeting somebody's dog gets involved.

Nobody will make you speak. You can sit with your camera off and your microphone muted for the entire hour, and plenty of people do exactly that for their first several meetings. If you want to say something, most chairs ask you to raise a hand, either the Zoom button or the physical kind.

The thing people find strangest at first is the ending. In a room, the meeting dissolves slowly: people stack chairs, somebody catches you at the door, you end up in the parking lot for twenty minutes. Online, the host clicks a button and you are back at your kitchen table. Some groups leave the room open afterward for exactly this reason. If yours does, staying for it is worth more than it sounds.

Anonymity when the meeting is on a screen

The Eleventh Tradition asks members to maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and film. Nobody wrote it with video calls in mind, and the practical questions are new even if the principle is not.

Your display name is the first thing to check, because most people have their full name sitting in their Zoom profile from work and never think about it. You can change it before you join, or right-click your own tile and rename yourself once you are in. First name and last initial is the usual convention.

Screenshots are the other one. Do not take them, and be aware that a room full of faces is a room full of people who did not agree to be photographed. Groups that got burned by this early on now say so out loud at the start of every meeting.

Beyond that, the ordinary rules apply. What is said in the meeting stays in the meeting. Who you saw there stays there too, which includes not mentioning it to the person themselves in a context where somebody else might overhear.

If you do not have reliable internet

Almost every Zoom meeting has a dial-in number attached to the same meeting ID, which turns it into a conference call. You lose the video and lose nothing else that matters. The number is normally listed alongside the link on the schedule, and if it is not, the intergroup will have it.

There are also phone-only meetings that never had video to begin with. These are less publicized and harder to find on your own, so the local intergroup line is the way in. Parts of the North Country and the Adirondacks have patchy service and these have stayed genuinely useful there.

Whether online is as good as in person

Members disagree about this, and the disagreement is worth understanding before you pick a side based on one bad experience.

What online does better is access. A meeting at 6 a.m. before work, a meeting from a hospital bed, a meeting on the third day of a snowstorm in Plattsburgh, a meeting when you are new and the idea of walking into a room full of strangers is the exact thing stopping you. It also lets people in small towns find a specialized meeting, a women's meeting, an LGBTQ meeting, a young people's meeting, when the nearest in-person version is ninety minutes away.

What it does worse is everything that happens around the edges. The conversation on the sidewalk afterward. Being handed a phone number on a scrap of paper. Somebody noticing you look terrible and asking about it. Making coffee for a room, which sounds trivial and is one of the more reliable ways people stay involved. A lot of what makes the thing work is not the hour of the meeting itself.

Most people who use both end up with a mix, and the mix shifts over time. Starting online and moving toward rooms later is common. So is the reverse, when someone's circumstances change. Nobody is keeping score.

Finding a meeting in your part of New York

The schedule links on this site cover every area and intergroup in the state, from the Capital Region and the North Country through to the five boroughs and out to Suffolk County. Pick the one covering your town and the local list will show times, formats and links.

If it is late and you want somewhere to go right now, the online directory at aa-intergroup.org is the shortest path.