in the profession as one of the three main social work methods. A Work- shop on Professional Education for Community Development was organized in June with the help of United Nations officials from the ECAFE office in Bangkok. Certainly the aims and duties of the Depart- ment in this direction are an essential complement to those quasi-political functions of the administration carried out by the New Territories Administration and the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs. A Community or Social Centre provides a focus for work in this field, but is not of course an end in itself. There are encouraging signs that the foundations laid in the past are now supporting real progress. The Department places great importance upon the training of members of groups to accept leadership. Committee members of many groups have been successfully encouraged to attend courses for this purpose, where they can meet their counterparts from clubs and societies at other centres. Social workers in the Department are encouraged to use each centre as a base from which the residents of each housing block may be visited in their own homes and interested in taking some part in the centre's activity. They also give judicious support, without control or condescension, to groups which have already come into existence spontaneously, or on the initiative of private individuals, in consolidating their achievements, in finding new members, offering space for meetings and so on; and when lone persons are found with special interests they are introduced to others with similar tastes. This is the network through which, stage by stage, residents are helped to become citizens, to develop co-operative attitudes, to increase their capacity to work together and, by furthering their own particular interests, to serve the wider interests of the community.
19. For the community as a whole, the subject of this chapter is the Department's most important target. It demands a more extrovert kind of worker than those whose main work lies in helping individuals or families who are in need; yet a practical understanding of the individual human mind, with all its quirks and foibles, is no less essential. No government or department can afford to forget that it is responsible for individual citizens and not for amorphous groups lacking in personal identity. Nor does the social group or community worker ever forget this.
CHAPTER III
YOUTH WELFARE
20. The earlier purpose of the Social Welfare Department's youth measures was to provide services for those children of 8 to 15 who could
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