SOCIAL WELFARE
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missionary bodies. The Social Welfare Office, which was set up in 1948, now comprises seven separate sections dealing with Relief, Child Welfare, Youth Welfare, Women's and Girls' Welfare, Probation, Special Welfare Services (which includes such handicapped groups as the blind and crippled) and Community Development. The last named section is to be transferred to the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs when the Social Welfare Office becomes the Department of Social Welfare in January 1958 and severs its former ties with the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs. In addition to the Social Welfare Office, governmental_action within the broader framework of the social services includes the rehousing of squatters, the extension and improvement of medical and educational 'facilities, and industrial welfare. These matters are the concern of the Resettlement, Medical, Education and Labour Departments respectively, and are dealt with in other chapters of this Report.
The large number of flourishing and efficient voluntary societies has made it possible for inter-related services to be built up in all fields of work which are the concern of the seven sections of the Social Welfare Office. Co-ordinating the activities of some forty of the larger voluntary agencies is the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, which was set up as an 'Emergency Relief Council' in 1938 to deal with the sudden influx of refugees from China. The Council has since been instrumental in setting up the Family Welfare Society and the Hong Kong Housing Society, and has initiated many other valuable projects. One of its more recent ventures, 'Welfare Handicrafts', is a non-profit- making shop, established in June 1956, which provides an outlet for the wide range of goods produced by private and Government welfare agencies in the Colony.
It is, however, in the artificially created communities of the Resettlement Estates that the function of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service as a co-ordinating body is becoming increasingly important. In order to ascertain the