American Jewish Committee to Train Personnel for Human Relations

An extensive year-long training program in human relations for 25 young Americans, including Peace Corps veterans, will be initiated with a two-week orientation institute in Washington, conducted by the American Jewish Committee’s Institute of Human Relations under the sponsorship of the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Foundation, it was announced here today.

Government and educational leaders, political scientists, as well as other authorities and specialists in group and race relations, will participate in the daily sessions at the Potomac Institute in Washington. After the two-week training period in Washington, these Peace Corps alumni, and others involved in the program who have already been assigned to agencies in the field, will work for a year with human rights commissions in cities throughout the country, labor unions, employment agencies, personnel directors of large corporations, and other groups, private and public, which may require human relations aid and experience.

After their year of training, it is planned that the trainees will take permanent jobs in the agencies they have trained with or in related human relations work. The 25 trainees, or human relations interns as they are called, are divided about half and half between men and women, and their average age is about 25, Each intern will be paid an annual salary of $5,000 for the year of training, with half the cost borne by the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Foundation and the other half to come from matching funds provided by participating organizations.

In announcing the orientation and training program, Morris B. Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee, stressed the “acute shortage” of human relations personnel which the Committee called “the newly emerging profession” urgently needed in the current national civil rights crisis.