Social_Welfare_Annual_Report_1965-1966 — Page 40

this necessitated the evacuation of the occupying families at very short notice, sometimes in a matter of hours. The combined total of those who had to resort to the department for assistance in disasters came to over twenty thousand; this number included those affected by land- slides, floods, house collapse or shipwreck as well as by fires. All these emergency relief measures require members of the Relief Section to rush out hot meals from their kitchens and to arrange temporary camping-out accommodation for the homeless in the covered play areas of government schools and elsewhere. Prompt aid and comfort to victims is due to the combined efforts and co-operation of the New Territories Administration, the Police Force, the Resettlement and Social Welfare Departments on the official side; while the co-operation and independent initiative of voluntary agencies is a necessity in times of emergency. The British Red Cross Society, Catholic Relief Services, Church World Services, CARE, the kai fong associations, Lutheran World Service and the Salvation Army are among the most active in providing or distributing, according to their capacity, cash grants, blankets, new and used clothing, food parcels or cooking utensils. Appendix 17 gives the details of the Department's emergency relief services during last year.

PUBLIC ASSISTANCE

59 However, most of the Relief Section's energy is devoted to individual small scale hardship. Though it is now recognized by a small but slowly growing section of the community that social work is a constructive branch of the social services and a positive force for rehabilitation in the community, social welfare is still often identified in the untutored mind with relief, that is with the doling out of alms. Public assistance to-day is not as simple as it may appear to those who have not studied it in action. Each applicant's circumstances are studied in the setting of his family and home, to determine the real need and to see whether any particular kind of assistance would be a step towards greater independence or would tend to induce irrespon- sibility. Support for the family unit is the first aim. Counselling is an integral part of this work, because very often the person requiring relief suffers from other problems than merely material or financial ones. The general object is to assist those who because of distress may have to rely temporarily on relief to become self-supporting as rapidly as is practicable. The skill and experience of a caseworker is needed to clarify the client's problems and help him to mobilize his own resources

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