Rehabilitation Fund Incorporated has reached its sketch plan stage. A site has been reserved at Kwun Tong, and the centre will be run by this department for the social and vocational rehabilitation of four hundred disabled people who will attend daily.
70 The first formal meeting of those government departments con- cerned with rehabilitation and of representatives of the Rehabilitation Division of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service was held at the end of December to discuss co-ordination. Co-ordination is important not only to increase the effectiveness of services but because Hong Kong is for various reasons becoming an object of interest to international advocates of rehabilitation. The first seminar sponsored by the former voluntary group which has since become the Rehabilitation Division afore-mentioned attracted a number of oversea participants returning to their home countries after attending the Pan-Pacific Conference on Rehabilitation held in Tokyo in April, to which Hong Kong had sent several delegates. The government has allocated a grant of $150,000 towards the Fourth Pan-Pacific Conference which will be held in Hong Kong in 1968.
BLIND WELFARE
71 Continuous efforts are being made by the Hong Kong Society for the Blind to put their workshop, which is heavily supported from public funds, on to a commercially competitive basis-selling its products such as brooms, brushes, wooden crates, chalk and buttons on their own merits rather than as having been made by the blind. This factory em- ploys a hundred and seventy workers, including a few with some other handicap than blindness. Apart from those at this workshop, the depart- ment itself helped ten others to find employment. Three departmental clubs for the blind assist them to adjust initially to their handicap.
72 The installation of a braille printing press at the Government Press--a donation of the United States Government through the American Women's Association-took place on 8 July. The new press will print books in both Cantonese and English braille. On 24 July, the Rotary Centre for the Blind, a gift to the Hong Kong Society for the Blind, was opened to provide training in telephony, dictaphone usage and short-hand typing. On 12 October, the braille library housed in this centre, a donation of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, was opened. The Canossa School for Blind Girls and the Ebenezer School and Home are two bodies which receive increasing support and guidance from the Special Education Section of the Education Department.
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