Social_Welfare_Annual_Report_1964-1965 — Page 36

the adoption of handicapped children both locally and overseas, and no opportunity is missed of trying to place them.

66. The economic and social independence of each family unit is an accepted fundamental aim of social work; but this is sometimes difficult to accomplish in the highly congested and rapidly changing Hong Kong scene of 1965. Various international and other organizations follow modern practice in this field in providing loans or grants of cash towards payment of rent, clothing or medical treatment, or for financing a trade, so as to tide families over difficult periods. A leading organization in this field is the Hong Kong Family Welfare Society, the workers of which paid well over seven thousand visits to homes, held getting on for forty thousand interviews and gave aid to some four thousand seven hundred families during this year. These would be impressive figures in any com- munity. The Resettlement Estates Loans Association, the Church of Christ in China, Lutheran World Service, Catholic Relief Services, the Christian Family Service Centre, the Society for the Protection of Children and other agencies render valuable assistance between them to thousands of families. This is only a representative list, and as may be seen in Appen- dix 6 some of these organizations receive support from the Hong Kong Government by way of subvention. Another form of financial aid is through the individual sponsorship of school children by Foster Parents Plan, which again helped to pay school fees for more than six thousand children during the year; its programme now also includes private medical care for entire families, loans for business projects and guidance in many family problems. Several other agencies and a number of funds support children in school. The Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children looks after approximately six and a half thousand young children, each of whom is taken by his own mother to one of the society's centres at least once a week. There the baby is weighed, bathed and treated for any minor ailment and the mother is advised on child care and hygiene and provided with a week's supply of milk and vitamins; the Society has also started to open day nurseries.

67. The number of babies abandoned by their families fell steeply by over half, from 138 to sixty-two, in the past year; this compares with over two hundred six years ago-see Appendix 14. Adoption of children under the Adoption Ordinance 1956 increased slightly during the year. This increase applied particularly to adoptions by arrangement between families rather than by application to the Director as legal guardian of children without parents. Details of adoptions are given at Appendix 15. The number of applications for adoptions received from overseas has

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