Prominent Welfare Worker Plans To Retire In U.S.

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30541, 9 September 1964, Page 2

Prominent Welfare Worker Plans To Retire In U.S.

“I am going to try to learn how to retire when I get back to New York,” said a prominent American social welfare worker (Dr. Elmina R. Lucke) in Christchurch yesterday. Dr. Lucke is visiting New Zealand on her way from the Pan Pacific and South-East Asia Women’s Association conference in Tonga to a regional seminar of the National Council of Women in Brisbane.

Dr. Lucke has a doctorate in humane letters and has worked as a resarch associate in social science at the University of Columbia. She has done social service work for the State Department in Egypt and India and worked with the United Nations in South-east Asia. Since she returned to the United States, Dr. Lucke has been a consultant at the United Nations and for five years the representative of the International Federation of University Women at the Economic and Social Council. International Work Dr. Lucke worked for 10 years, from 1945, on international work in South-east Asia. “I had a special inter-

est in the merging of newly independent countries and the importance women have had to play in their development,” she said. Dr. Lucke worked with the United . Nations in Asia and she went to the Pan Pacific and South-east Asia Women’s Association conference because of her active interest in the association since the South-east Asian countries were added. “At the conference I found such consciousness of serious problems which come from such rapid development from the old to the new,” said Dr. Lucke. “In every delegation there was an awareness of bow vital a role women can have in saving the best of the old and taking on the best of the new. “There was also a very definite awareness of the importance of co-operation between nations, between voluntary organisations and government, and between men and women.

“The value of informed public opinion and ready competent leadership were stressed in all the languages of the conference.” Mekong Project

“The Pan Pacific and Southeast Asia Women’s Association is going to continue its interest in the Mekong river project, a United Nations project which will change the lives of 40 million people in four South-east Asian countries,” said Dr. Lucke. ■ “The organisation will attempt to help the thoughtful women of these nations to prepare for these big changes of resettlement and organisation through the United Nations co-ordina-tion committee in Bangkok.” Dr. Lucke’s last assignment with the United Nations was in Pakistan as chief of missions for the Pakistan United Nations social welfare project. “That international team began urban community development, established training for volnutary social workers, and began graduate schools in social work in universities in Punjab and Dacca,” she said. “Earlier I had the privilege of being the Western adviser in establishing the first university in Asia to give masters’ degrees, in Delhi. This was a gift to new India from the Y.W.C.A. of Burma, India, Ceylon and the United States. “I have never known a harder working people who are earnest in their determination to do something for every one of their citizens,” said Dr. Lucke.

“They are now eager for

me to go back and appraise the work that has been done and give advice on further development,” she said. “I am going back to India and Pakistan, to do this, on an unofficial invitation, on my way back to New York.”