The New York Society for the Improvement of Urban Conditions among Negroes is seeking to train colored men and women for probationary work among their own race. In the past year 464 cases of adult and juvenile delinquency were handled. “The Committee takes special pains to secure thorough follow-up work. Each case is treated as one of special importance in which the worker handling the same considers herself personally responsible.” A class of girls which the magistrates’ court assigned to the Association for care and which other associations have turned over to it is being instructed in gardening by a teacher furnished by the Board of Education. The Society also tries to reinstate discharged employees when mere misunderstandings have led to dismissal and in other deserving cases. It believes in labor organization as an aid to this security. So many other forms of social effort are working toward the same goal as probation that it is impossible to estimate the number engaged in preventing individuals from becoming public offenders and public charges. Probation officers do use, and are urged to use further, all existing organizations which are established to supply fundamental needs like shelter, food, clothing, employment, medical help, recreation, education and the rest. Indeed probation officers are dependent upon the organized efforts to supply those needs—so dependent that probation work can proceed only in proportion to the effectiveness of those organizations. Here then we have a condition of a great public service, one of the greatest, being still dependent on private charity and effort. Many elements, like competition, intermittency of help, and incompetency owing to the volunteer nature of the organization, prevent the widest usefulness of these allied agencies upon which success in probationary work so largely depends. For that reason there are probationary as well as other social workers who begin to emphasize the ideal of public concentration of social effort in the city administration with the aim of eliminating waste and securing certainty of support and steadiness of trained effort. All the forces of the community need to be centrally organized, it is argued, to meet the requirements of the probationary system and such central organization must be governmental since the probation function is a governmental one.