has also taken the initiative in promoting a number of projects, often through a sub-committee. During the year the Council was particularly concerned with preparations for the establishment of a centre for the rehabilitation of the physically handicapped and with the problem of indebtedness. With the object of preventing duplication in relief work, the Council set up a central relief records office during the year, to which most bodies administering relief forward particulars of cases, to be centrally filed; this is a valuable safeguard against abuses.
79. In the field of youth work, the Standing Conference of Youth Organizations brings together the majority of the voluntary bodies concerned and itself runs the Silvermine Bay Holiday Camp. During the year the Standing Conference organized an International Seminar on Social Group work among Youth which is more fully dealt with in Chapter II. The Boys' and Girls' Clubs Association, to which virtually all the youth clubs, including those run by the Department, are affiliated may also be said to have co-ordinating functions in its own field.
80. The work of the Port Welfare Committee is referred to in Chapter XIII.
81. By the end of the year, the Hong Kong Social Workers' Asso- ciation counted well over one hundred members from the staffs of ten organizations and Government Departments. This Association is a focus for professional and personal contacts between Social Workers, what- ever their field of work or employing agency.
82. In the field of social welfare it may be said that voluntary bodies have distinct advantages over departments of Government in certain respects. For instance, freedom from the stringent regulations which necessarily hedge the expenditure of public funds invests them with greater flexibility and makes it easier for them to experiment; they are also able to call on the personal service of numbers of devoted workers who have dedicated themselves without reward either entirely or in their leisure time to social work and often have a specially sympathetic insight into the needs of the individual. On the other hand, while voluntary bodies may be able to operate more flexibly and more economically in many respects, they often require the support which Government's greater financial resources, continuity of organization and specially trained staff can supply.
83. It would however be both invidious and superfluous, in the context of Hong Kong, to attempt to relegate official and voluntary organizations each to their own distinct and separate sphere, because
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