essential complement to those quasi-political functions of the adminis- tration carried out by the New Territories Administration and the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs. A community or social centre provides one focus for this work, but is not an end in itself. The foundations laid in the part are now supporting real progress. Social workers in the department are encouraged to use each centre as a base from which the resident neighbours may be visited and interested in taking some part in a social activity. 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.
16 The need for stability in the community impinges at various points on the work of the Social Welfare Department, perhaps most conspicuously on that part of it which is concerned with community organization. It demands an extrovert, robust and imaginative approach; 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. Those in the department are well aware of their political value.
CHAPTER III
YOUTH WELFARE
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
THOREAU
17 The original, limited, purpose of the Social Welfare Depart- ment's youth service was to provide some healthy activity for those children of 8 to 15 who could not get into school; but since it is now so very much easier for the average child to enter a primary school, more energy can be turned to the creation of outlets for the energies of the inflammable group of young people between 14 and 21 years of age. The Youth Welfare Section of the department, when performing its titular functions, tries therefore to stimulate new and improved facilities. Typical of its own efforts are its 'groups' at the community and social centres, but a separate youth centre also exists at Sham Shui Po, mainly for young people of that area. Within its first year, this centre has developed into four club groups, fifteen interest groups and
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