The administrative records of the MCSA contain annual reports, 1921-1968; minutes of annual meetings, 1956-1971; minutes and correspondence of the Board of Governors and its Executive Committee, 1953-1972; files on budgets and staffing, 1962-1973; and documents on the merger with the Conseil de Développement Social. The operations of standing committees (Committee on Committees, Admissions and Standards, Nominating, etc) are documented by broken series of minutes from 1937 to 1971. Far more extensive are the papers of special committees researching social problems such as school leaving, 1934; single parents, 1949; housing and urban renewal, 1967-1971; dental services for children, 1950-1961; and low-cost medication, 1970-1971. These files include case work studies, correspondence, minutes and reports. The question of day care is particularly well covered, both through committee materials and through the files of Barbara Heppner, MCSA Day Care Coordinator, 1969-70. Correspondence files contain letters and reports from member agencies, university schools of social work, co-ordinating bodies such as the Canadian Welfare Council and the Conseil de Bien-Etre du Québec, various citizen's groups, and government bodies. A large percentage of this material consists of information files, containing reports of, and studies by, American and Canadian social agencies, conference and workshop proceedings, and materials on social legislation.

Second only to Projects and Task Forces in number of files, the Reports, Studies, Briefs and Surveys Series has the oldest document in M.G. 2076, the J.H.T. Falk inspired Social and Financial Survey of Protestant and Non-Sectarian Social Agencies of 1919 (file 11). Though after the mid-1960s Projects and Task Forces tended to appropriate records which previously would have gone to Reports, Studies, Briefs And Surveys, the latter series nonetheless remains a prime indicator of social welfare problems, policies and resources for most of the Council's history. With input from internal (especially committee and section) sources and external contributors alike, it features studies and reports by and, about particular MCSA agencies as well as the institution collectively, besides those addressing numerous other welfare issues. Content ranges from mundane questions of infrastructure - administrative organization and function, or Red Feather fundraising and personnel practices, for instance -- to Executive Director J.W. Frei's scholarly, theoretical paper on Research in Socio-Cultural Development (file 289).

Briefs to the federal and provincial governments are an important element of this series. Among the noteworthy are those to the 1968 Royal Commission on the Status of Women (file 861) and the 1964 Special Senate Committee on Aging (file 954), as well as that on Social Policy for Quebec (the 1967 Castonguay Commission, file 5). The two latter submissions indeed come complete with drafts and working papers (files 428, 560 and 936 respectively). Draft documents similarly figure with finished ones in the welfare planning study of Greater Montreal's English-speaking Protestant community conducted by the National Study Service of New York for the MCSA, and in J.W. Frei's response (files 986-988 and 166). While much of the material in this series relates to meeting physical and psychological needs in conventional social agency terms readily intelligible across Canada, a few items also deal with concerns like Quebec's constitutional position, and bilingualism and biculturalism, which have a special relevance for Montreal.