Family Service of Los Angeles.

Administrative History

Los Angeles in the early 1920s doubled its population. As the city became metropolitan and its suburban communities began to spread out in continuous conurbation across the basin, city and county governments remained small and the provision of adequate social services for the new population inevitably lagged. Family Service of Los Angeles (known until 1946 as Family Welfare Association of Los Angeles) had its genesis in a 1925 report by social work educators Karl de Schweinitz and his wife Ruth Hill, whose "Social Work With Families in Los Angeles", produced under the direction of the American Association For Organizing Family Social Work, first alerted local social workers to the extent of the region's unmet need. But the Los Angeles Community Chest was then in only its first year of operation, and its social work arm, the Council of Social Agencies, had yet to be organized. In 1926, an initial request for funding of the report's proposal was declined.

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