Welcome to the Memphis Area Archives Committee (MAAC)

The MAAC Statement of Purpose

Consistent with Alcoholic Anonymous's primary purpose of maintaining our sobriety and helping other alcoholics achieve recovery, the Memphis Area Archives Committee (MAAC) will serve its constituent groups in the following ways: Receiving, classifying, and indexing material considered to have enduring value; holding, preserving, and providing access to this material; carrying the AA message.

What does MAAC do?

We make a concerted effort to attend as many of our constituent district, intergroup, and group functions as possible. We establish and maintain strong relationships with old-timers and trusted servants - with an eye towards documenting, collecting, and creating useful and interesting archival material. We do have a traveling collection and will be happy to make a presentation at any area AA function.

01. GROUP HISTORIES
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These form the backbone of a district or intergroup-level archival collection. All groups are encouraged not only to fill out the forms we provide but also to augment them with free-form narratives and pictures of meeting places. Founding group conscience's are particularly noteworthy additions.

We attend group anniversaries and encourage groups to have a member provide their history as a lead-in to the featured speaker.

02. SPEAKERS
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Our archivist has embarked on an "Over-40 Series" program to extensively interview old-timers. Over twenty interviews have already been conducted, averaging over two hours.

We record local AA talks made by speakers having over thirty years sobriety and/or an exceptional record of group, district, or area level service.

03. ARTIFACTS
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Our ever-growing collection contains items from the earliest days of Memphis AA in the 1940s up to the present.

Examples include early meeting preambles, early meeting directories, member memoirs, narrative histories, birthday cards, engraved lighters, and signed flyers.

We collect and preserve records of important events such as group anniversaries, old-timer birthdays, district functions, and intergroup functions.

04. EVENT RECORDING
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We record all informational events held by the groups, district and intergroup - including but not limited to workshops, panels, old-timer days, and delegate reports.