the Relief Section
(public assistance and emergency relief); and the Training Unit
(in-service training)
12. In addition to its direct services to people in need, the Department tries to offer leadership to others toiling in the social welfare vineyard by encouraging better quality and training of social workers and stimulating fact-finding and social investigation; it encourages and co-operates in the extension of voluntary services to fill newly discovered or unmet needs, and in the re-orientation of agency services where this is necessary in order to keep abreast of the times; and it operates a number of pilot or training projects.
13. Under the Principal Social Welfare Officers there serve both professional staff and some specialist employees. Secretarial, clerical, accounting and office and menial staff complete the establishment; for these the Secretary of the Department is mainly responsible. A summary of the senior staff and of the establishment is given by schedules of respon- sibility and by categories at Appendix 7.
14. Total expenditure during the year on social welfare falling within the Department's purview was, in round figures, thirteen and a quarter million dollars, of which subventions to voluntary agencies accounted for well over five millions, direct welfare work for nearly two and a third millions, and salaries and other administrative expenses for the remainder. Appendix 6 gives the figures in detail and compares expenditure with that in previous years and with the amount voted by the legislature for the next financial year.
CHAPTER II
COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION
15. If there is one imperative need obvious above all others in Hong Kong, it is to take determined and unfaltering steps to stimulate a sense of community and social responsibility. The phenomenal post-war growth of the population and the economy alike made for a lack of social cohesion as inevitable as it is disturbing. Hong Kong is in most practical ways not a settlement with a history of 124 years (much less an outpost of the world's most ancient continuous and uniform culture) but rather a great assemblage of people, few of whose corporate memories can go back as long as twenty or twenty-five years without some traumatic break. The population is now about three and three quarter millions, compared with 650,000 in 1945. Well over a third are even more recent
6