on problems and approaches in work with youth, as well as on leader- ship training.
47. One of the recommendations made at the Conference resulted in the Division of Children and Youth of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service establishing a Regional Youth Work Information Centre. Summer is the period when youths need creative recreation and pur- poseful activities most. Most youth agencies expanded their summer programmes during the year with the effective co-ordination of the Youth and Children's Division of the Hong Kong Council of Social Service. A total of one hundred and twenty thousand young people benefited from these programmes organized by voluntary agencies, which covered an extensive range of indoor and outdoor interests, from interior decorating, oratory, dancing and drama to shooting, fishing and overnight expeditions. The Social Welfare Department extended this service to some eleven thousand youths mainly in outdoor pursuits-a big advance compared with the previous year. More than two hundred young people themselves undertook a short course of training and subsequently gave up a part of their holidays to help in children's clubs and elsewhere; others involved themselves in work-camps in the New Territories where, while living in the villages, they carried out such tasks as building concrete paths and clearing playing fields for the benefit of the villages, and incidentally for their own benefit and enjoyment in a variety of ways. In this way service and recreation are combined, and youth are linked to the society with activities which fulfil a need for achievement and purpose on the one hand and a real need on the other.
48. The recent disturbances in Hong Kong have brought the need for better and more diversified youth service to the fore. Recreation provisions and guided youth group activities are widely recognized as a means for the prevention of juvenile crimes, which are so often occasioned by the lack of healthy channels to release their energies constructively and from social dislocation from the society at large. Young people constitute half our population, and there is a great re- servoir of potential waiting to be harnessed for the progressive economic and social development of Hong Kong. Facilities which will enable young people to develop their physical, intellectual, social and emotional well being are a sound investment. Trained professional youth workers at all levels have always the key to the quality of services provided but volunteers have still an essential role to play in the development of recreation and youth services.
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