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In addition, we must open up new career fields in mental retardation programs.

Trained, professionally recognized supportive workers can take on much of the work now done by physicians, nurses, social workers, psychologists, therapists and administrators. Here, in fact, is the most significant challenge and opportunity in the mental retardation manpower area. In such work, non-college and junior college graduates can meet great need and build satisfying careers.

Broader use of supportive workers in mental retardation programs could also tap major reservoirs of precious human resource that are presently little utilized. For example, students (through such activities as the Student Work Experience and Training program) and elderly persons (through such activities as the Foster Grandparent Program) have created valued places for themselves in work with the retarded. Programs of this kind need major expansion.

If, however, these opportunities are to be seized fully and the field's specialists freed to use their skills to maximum effect, many walls and barriers erected in the name of "professionalism" must be torn down.

Finally, the priceless extras of care and help that community volunteers, both adult and youth, can bring to the mentally retarded in community as well as institutional programs need to be more widely appreciated and called into service.

3. Fuller use of existing resources is a necessity.

The final aim of all programs and services for the mentally retarded is that the retarded individual receive the help he needs at the time and place he needs it. All mental retardation program planners and service-giving staffs, at whatever level, should build and coordinate their efforts to contribute to the efficient realization of that aim. Appropriate incentives -- decision-making authority, opportunity to make and test innovations, and recognition of creative program contributions -- should be given to encourage those planning and conducting services to participate in their steady improvement.

The critical point for coordination of planning and service is the level at which services are given -- the community.

Agency and private organization workers with the retarded must learn how to make skillful, imaginative and full use of the many resources already available to them in their daily community contacts and from state, regional and national sources.

They must also learn to work and think together so that each service they plan and make available for the mentally retarded and their families will join all possible and needed resources in accomplishing its purpose.

Information and citizen involvement are indispensable to success in this area. Governors' advisory groups on mental retardation services and state coordinating bodies should actively promote the formation of voluntary associations on behalf of the retarded in every community (or group of communities) in their states. Each citizen should have access to a directory of state services for the retarded. Particular attention must be given to measures by which the new parents of a retarded child may receive immediate assurance that they are not alone and that there is hope and help for their child and themselves.

Finally, families having mentally retarded children should be informed of and encouraged to make use of the casework, foster care, protection and medical services available through public and private welfare agencies.

Work at the service-giving local level, however, must be backed by effective coordination, cooperation, and leadership at state, regional and national levels. Great improvement could be effected in these areas.

4. More public-private partnerships in program development, services and research are needed.

Such partnerships join citizen initiative and imagination with state and federal resources. They give all levels a stake in the solving of social service problems.

Among possible partnerships in the field of mental retardation; foundation-assisted demonstration projects in disadvantaged areas . . . cooperative labor-industry studies and experimental projects in employment and vocational rehabilitation of the mentally retarded . . . application of industry-developed systems management techniques to the meeting of local and state mental retardation needs . . . cooperative programs for improvement of public library resources in mental retardation materials . . . public grant assistance to voluntary organizations wishing to stimulate innovative services to the mentally retarded ... a cooperative project of government, universities, and technical publishers to translate and make foreign-language mental retardation research and program reports available.

Local and state governments, especially, should promote and enter such partnerships as part of an enlightened public policy to foster long-range growth that is shaped, led and endorsed by the citizens concerned.

5. A national mental retardation information and resource center should be developed.