Commonwealth Foundation A “Gesture Of Faith”

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31754, 10 August 1968, Page 19

Commonwealth Foundation A “Gesture Of Faith”

(Specially written for "The Press” by TUI THOMAS)

The Commonwealth Foundation in London is part of a vast network of human and practical relationships that does not get the amount of publicity focused on political disturbances in the Commonwealth. But in this area of co-operation lies the real value of an interracial partnership.

Established in March, 1966, to increase interchanges between professional organisations in the Commonwealth, the foundation is concerned with persons and their work rather than Governments. It is one of about 120 official and non-official Commonwealth agencies that flourish in specialised fields, however tense the strains between member Governments may be.

These are the people-to-people alliances, where educational and other common assets are shared on a solid intellectual and social basis. And it is this part of the Commonwealth fabric that critics forget (or do not know about) when they persist in calling it a myth or a gigantic farce. “Encouraging Sign” Mr John Chadwick, director of the Commonwealth Foundation who will be in Christchurch on Monday, has said that the foundation’s conception was a gesture of faith in the modern Commonwealth, made at a time when many members were resigning themselves to its demise. “The Times,” London, commented a year ago: “Probably the most encouraging sign in recent years of the health of the Commonwealth has been the Commonwealth Foundation, formed to strengthen the links between professional men and women and ‘heir institutions.”

By October of last year, 24 Commonwealth nations (including New Zealand) and the Commonwealth Secretariat were represented on the foundation’s board of trustees. The chairman is Sir Macfarlane Burnet, a distinguished Australian microbiologist and Nobel Prize winner.

Britain subscribes half the annual income of £250,000 stipulated in an agreed memorandum from the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ meeting in 1965. The other half is made up by the rest of the member nations. Diverse Grants In the first 18 months of its life, the foundation had budgeted for a total of £173,723 in grants. Awards were made in the professions of accountancy, architecture, education, engineering, law, medicine, public administration and management, surveying and the sciences. A grant of £7500 was made to the University of the West Indies, for instance, to assist over three years in financing a lectureship -in accountancy. The Commonwealth Association of Architects received a grant of £20,000 to help it develop advisory services and to constitute a Commonwealth Board of Architectural Education.

The University of Zambia got £5OOO so that a Canadian expert in adult education could spend six months advising and training personnel in East and Central Africa. Representatives of legal associations in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Barbados were able to attend a special session of the Canadian Bar Association

at Nassau earlier this year on a £5OO grant from the foundation. For African Doctors Up-country doctors in Uganda will be able to attend refresher courses made possible by a grant of £3250 awarded to the Uganda Medical Association. A regular medical bulletin will be printed and circulated from the same award. The Association of Commonwealth Universities has received £20,000 to ensure attendance of Commonwealth university representatives at the tenth Commonwealth Universities Congress in Sydney this month. The British Epilepsy Association received £lOOO to send its secretary-general to certain Commonwealth countries in West and East Africa on an advisory visit. An Indian surgeon, temporarily attached to a British hospital, was granted £125 to visit other plastic surgery centres in England. The Kenya Association of University Women received £420 to send a professional member to Britain on a special project. Young Scientists Younger scientists from developing Commonwealth countries will be able to attend the next meeting of the Commonwealth Scientific Committee in Karachi from a grant of £3OOO made available.

The foundation has also made funds available for two special projects. Professional

centres and basic reference libraries for the professions have been established in Kampala, Uganda, and Port of Spain, Trinidad, on a grant of £24,000. Commonwealth Foundation lectureships will be provided annually to enable Commonwealth men and women, eminent in their professions, to give lectures at institutions and universities in groups of Commonwealth countries. The first two were made in the fields of agricultural sciences and geology from a grant of £5OOO.

These grants, taken at random from a list of 60 recorded in the foundation’s first annual report, show the diversity of the awards made in the board’s experimental year.

The Comomnwealth Foundation had set out to show that the Commonwealth, through its professional societies and their members, was a live and continuously developing social organism, Mr Chadwick said in the report. Director’s Visit Mr Chadwick is visting New Zealand to have discussions with leading professional bodies, with Government officials directly concerned with their activities and with professional faculty leaders in as many universities as possible. He will visit the University of Canterbury and Lincoln College on Monday. In the evening he will, address a representative meeting of professional interests arranged by the Canterbury branch of the Royal Commonwealth Society.