Remarks Upon Proclaiming Voluntary Overseas Aid Week.

IT IS a pleasure to welcome you as the representatives of American religious and humanitarian agencies engaged in overseas relief work. Your work complements the efforts of the American people as expressed through the United States Government.

Our foreign assistance programs--our participation in the United Nations, the Peace Corps, the food for Peace programs-have the same objectives as the voluntary agencies: to relieve misery, hunger, and affliction wherever they may be found.

Yours is a mission of mercy, and on behalf of all Americans I should like to thank you for your deep commitment--moral, financial, and technical--to this mission.

I should especially like to thank you for your participation in the food for Peace program. During the past year you have distributed nearly three billion pounds of our agricultural abundance to a hundred nations. The Congress, by Joint Resolution adopted, calling for a Proclamation designating the week of April 9, 1962, as Voluntary Overseas Aid Week, recognized and voiced its appreciation for your work.

So it is with pleasure and gratitude that I declare the week beginning April 9, 1962, as Voluntary Overseas Aid Week.

I would like to emphasize that I do not believe that our assistance programs abroad, especially those that involve the distribution of food, could possibly be effective unless we had the very wholehearted cooperation of the voluntary agencies. This partnership between the American people and the National Government and the voluntary agencies which distribute this food, the various religious and charitable organizations, really represents, I think, the best aspirations of our country--making the program infinitely more effective, infinitely more personal, to provide a direct link between the people who are helped and the American people in a way which a merely governmental contribution could not do.

I think it reminds us of the old injunction about feeding those who are hungry, visiting those who are sick, and caring for those who are in prison. So I want you gentlemen to know we are very grateful for your help, for your helping the hundreds of thousands of people who are members of these organizations and the hundreds of people overseas who work very selflessly to bring this aid to needy people.