Here is an adapted extract from a letter to friends and colleagues from his wife Mora.
On September 23rd '94, Alec died quietly at home. For a number of years he had cancer, kept at bay by pills. But in January this year we were told that it had 'broken free'. This did not prevent Alec from accepting future invitations to speak or seeking opportunities to poke, prod or harry where he could those whom he felt might still be doing more for young people and service to the community - wherever or whatever the community was. To the end he retained the power to show others the vision and to inspire young people to action. Even in his last weeks, ravaged by illness, the young continued to visit him. Both he and I were moved when some kissed him goodbye.
Alec's message was a simple one, and it never changed. What made it impressive was that he lived it out. Love and help those less fortunate - and have confidence in their ability to do the same. He believed especially in the young. His vision made it possible for very many of them to accept challenges and tackle tasks that seemed at first impossible.
Mora Dickson, 19 Blenheim Road, London W4 1UB (tel 0181 994 7437). The following is an extract from Alec Dickson's obituary in The Times (Sept 26th '94).
When Alec Dickson and his wife Mora first proposed Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) with the object of enabling young people from Britain to go out to developing countries for a year or more and help in such practical tasks as teaching, nursing and agricultural work, it received a cool reception in Whitehall. 'It won't work Alec,' he was told, 'It's radiologists and engineers in pre-stressed concrete they need overseas - not British school kids who have nothing to offer but their pimples.'
Undaunted, Dickson dispatched VSO's first dozen eighteen-year-olds to Ghana, Nigeria and Sarawak in 1958, and this small trickle soon developed into a flood of thousands. VSO rapidly grew to become one of the largest voluntary organisations of its kind. As the years went by, its volunteers changed too, from school-leavers to trained graduates who often spent two or more years working overseas and were thus able to make a more valuable contribution to the voluntary effort.
The value of VSO was immediately seen in other countries which were thinking about the way to make voluntary aid to the emergent nations more effective. The Americans were particularly keen on the VSO blueprint and in 1961 Dickson was summoned to the US to advise President Kennedy on the establishment of the Peace Corps.
While he was away, however, criticism of Dickson's stewardship of VSO broke out into open revolt among his staff. It was felt in London that he was stronger on inspiration than administration and that with the organisation growing larger by the month a more professional hand was needed at the helm. Returning home to Britain, Dickson found that he was no longer director of VSO.
At first he was totally disorientated. His life's work had been taken from him. But as he was later to say: 'There were wildernesses and deserts here in Britain.' Dickson and his wife immediately went to work to set up Community Service Volunteers to give school-leavers the opportunity to spend some time living away from home, engaged in some socially useful work in their own country.
Unlike the highly selective VSO, which had favoured the public school and the university volunteer, CSV was to be open to anyone who could possibly make themselves useful. Most of its volunteers were teenagers; some came from the young unemployed, from children in care, from those undergoing Borstal training, from the handicapped and from cadets on secondment from the armed services or the police force. They worked among Vietnamese boat people, in delinquency centres, in homes for the elderly and in psychiatric units. In many cases the year of voluntary service acted as therapy for those undertaking it, giving them a sense of self respect their previous institutionalised lives had failed to do.
CSV was the first organisation of its kind anywhere in the world and aroused considerable international interest. President Johnson directly copied it when he set up Volunteers in Service to America in 1963 and Alec Dickson was in constant demand as a consultant and adviser to governments and volunteer organisations across the globe.
Dickson, who remained as director of CSV until 1982, when he became its honorary president, was constantly coming up with new ideas and projects. He sought to persuade schools and colleges to link their curricula with the needs of the local community and pioneered tutoring schemes whereby older pupils helped younger ones in the classroom.
He was also a persistent and powerful voice in the campaign in the early 1980s to establish a national social service scheme for all school-leavers in Britain, of the type that exists in Germany as an alternative to military conscription. If he did not always persuade the political and educational establishment of the wisdom and feasibility of his schemes, it was not for want of forceful advocacy and assiduous lobbying. He was an indefatigable letter writer and public speaker.