Just as the Perpetual Emigration Fund was instrumental in helping more than 30,000 early Church members on their journey to join the Saints in the Salt Lake Valley, a new Perpetual Education Fund will help a substantial number of Church members today on their journey to become self sufficient.

President Gordon B. Hinckley announced March 31 the creation of a worldwide Perpetual Education Fund to benefit young men and women in underprivileged countries. The fund will assist primarily returned missionaries from underdeveloped countries who often return to a life of poverty after Church service, lacking the resources to pay for an education.

"Where there is widespread poverty among our people, we must do all we can to help them lift themselves, to establish their lives upon a foundation of self-reliance that can come of training," President Hinckley said in announcing the new program during the priesthood session of conference Saturday evening. "Education is the key to opportunity. This training must be done in the areas where they live. It will then be suited to the opportunities of those areas."

The New Perpetual Education Fund will:

• Serve Church members from areas of the world such as Asia, Africa, Mexico, Central America, South America and the Philippines who lack resources to pay for an education.

• Assist, for the most part, returned missionaries.

• Provide loans, with minimal interest, to be repaid once recipients have completed their education and are gainfully employed.

• Be funded by contributions from Church members.

• Be directed through the Church institute program. Institute directors will accept applications and make recommendations for loans, which will then be issued from Salt Lake City to the institution where an individual will receive his or her education.

• Entail no new organization, no new personnel except a volunteer director and secretary.

• Cost essentially nothing to administer.

• Benefit a "very substantial number."

• Begin modestly, commencing this fall.

• Not be a welfare effort, but an educational opportunity.

• Be a revolving resource, as was the Perpetual Emigration Fund, where money is loaned, repaid and then loaned again to others in need.

"This is not a dream," said President Hinckley of the new education fund. "We have the resources. We have generous friends. We have the organization. We have the manpower and dedicated servants of the Lord to make it succeed. . . .

"We pray that God will prosper this effort, and that it will bring blessings, rich and wonderful, upon the heads of thousands just as its predecessor organization, the Perpetual Emigration Fund, brought untold blessings upon the lives of those who partook of its opportunities."