Series 01 - Administrative Records

With surviving records dating from 1936, Administrative Records reveals much of the practical functioning of the MCSA at the executive level as to day-to-day business and to some extent also in matters of longer term policy. In files typically spanning anything from a year to a decade or more, it documents executive supervision of the four Sections -- Case Work; Group Work and Recreation; Health; and Older Persons -- and the standing and special committees appointed by the Board of Directors (formerly Governors) and their Executive Committee. The heaviest of any series in correspondence, Administrative Records contain a high percentage of the communications of the President (who also served as the Chairman of the Board), the Executive and Assistant Executive Director, the Secretary and the Board of Directors variously with other officials, committees, and member organizations and their delegates to the Council.

It also holds reports, briefs, and minutes generated by external welfare agencies or internally by MCSA members and submitted to the executive (i.e., the Directors). But the Board of Directors also produced their own minutes, memoranda and reports, some of which survive in this series. The correspondence, policy statements and working papers in Administrative Records reveal the MCSA's over-all direction, perhaps never more so than in the late 1960s and early 1970s wherein along with the Committees Series they detail connections and merger negotiations with the Conseil des Oeuvres and then the Conseil de Developpement Social. In thus chronicling the transformation of an established, autonomous English-speaking institution into, first, an increasingly bilingual and then a French-as-official-language one (albeit with a provision for other language service to anglophone or allophone agencies and clientele), they reflect QueQec nationalist pressures in the wider society about them.

The series provides a main link with universities (most signally the long-standing affiliation with the McGill School of Social Work); Montreal, Canadian and Quebec governments; and such varied bodies as the Canadian Welfare Council, Association Cooperative d'Economie Familiale, Conseil de Bien-Etre du Quebec, Canadian Mental Health Association, and United Community Funds and Councils of America. Administrative Records likewise act as the medium of liaison with Welfare Federation and United Red Feather Services in regard to pensions, benefits and conditions of employment for paid personnel.