The Carnegie United Kingdom Trust

Abstract

So all-pervasive are the Trust's activities that its annual report (Twenty-fourth Annual Report, January-December 1937, approved by the Trustees at their General Meeting held on Friday, March 4, 1938. Pp. vi + 92 + 2 plates. Dunfermline: Carnegie United Kingdom Trust) is almost equivalent to an index to all organized voluntary effort toward social amelioration. It is noteworthy that a very large proportion of the enterprises favoured by the Trust are concerned with rural life: land settlement, rural community councils, village halls, survey of Scottish villages, local history records, schools for rural music conductors, young farmers' clubs, women's institutes, youth hostels, Y.M.C.A. farm-training scheme, village colleges, women's rural institutes' handicrafts scheme. Land settlement schemes, for which the Trust allocated £150,000 for the period 1936-40, progressed steadily last year. The Land Settlement Association now controls twenty-five estates in fifteen English counties, comprising 11,000 acres and providing, when fully developed, small-holdings for 7,000 persons, all taken from distressed areas. The settlers who are definitely established are happy in their surroundings and are mixing more and more with the old inhabitants of neighbouring villages, and the general health, especially of the children, has shown notable improvement. The Association is, however, finding it difficult to induce local authorities to make use of the powers vested in them. For many years, the Trust has fostered the development of agencies for caring for the welfare of boys and girls over fourteen years of age. Among these are the National Association of Boys' Clubs and the National Council of Girls' Clubs, which are in receipt of subsidies from the Trust amounting to £25,000 for the current quinquennium. Valuable as the work of these clubs undoubtedly is, it is very small in volume when compared with the corresponding activities in Germany and Italy.