Steering Committee Meeting Minutes, 1997

Series I: Administrative, includes mission statements and bylaws, meeting minutes, correspondence, financial records, and a few other files relating to the administration of the organization that do not fit into any of the aforementioned categories.

In the early years of the organization, the minutes often referred to "planning" or "steering committee" meetings or they did not indicate a specific type of meeting at all. In the 2000s, the minutes began to differentiate between board meetings and executive committee meetings. For greater simplicity, the minutes are filed by calendar year rather than fiscal year. In order to avoid classifying any of the minutes incorrectly, the minutes were generally filed according to the name that appeared on the majority of documents for that year, e.g. "Meeting Minutes", "Planning Meeting", or "Steering Committee" [Meeting]. For the years in which there were clearly separate minutes for Board Meetings and Executive Committee Meetings, those minutes were separated into their own folders, but still arranged by calendar year.

Although the minutes cover the date span of 1996-2013, there is not a complete run of the minutes for these years. There appear to be at least one or two minutes documents missing for each year, but the years of 2011 to the present seem to lack the most. For some of the meetings, an agenda is available, but a copy of the actual minutes is not. When available, the agenda are interfiled in the same folders with the meeting minutes.

Some financial documents were filed with the minutes because of finance reports being given during the meetings. When they were found this way, they were retained with the minutes. However, there were also a number of financial reports that were not interfiled with the meeting minutes, so separate "Financial Reports" files were maintained for those documents. The correspondence files and financial records are not currently voluminous enough to make up their own series or subseries, so they are filed after the meeting minutes and labeled with the date ranges they represent.

Two of the files at the end of the Administrative Series do not really fit into any of the three currently existing series of these records, "Photographs of Members" and "Member Deaths". The "Photographs of Members" file consists of paper printouts of photographs of two members from an e-mail message. Apparently, no other member photographs were filed in this way. These two files came labeled that way by the organization when the files were accessioned, and they were retained and placed at the end of Series I, even though they are not administrative.

The Administrative Series ends with files related to specific visits to the U.S. and/or correspondence from individual Russian members/partners (including Fr. Nikolai Aksenov and Dr. Igor Tolochin). These files are labelled with each person's name. Although not strictly administrative, they form a good transition into Series II, Projects, which covers many of exchanges in which these partners were involved.

Series II, Projects, includes files relating to MVERN's mission and outreach. The bulk of these files relate to youth and adult exchange trips sponsored by MVERN. This series also contains some files related to other events and fundraisers (e.g., 18-month Russia calendar).

Series III, Publicity, mostly consists of newspaper clippings and articles (sometimes written by participants themselves) relating to MVERN's sponsored trips.