ONE thing you can say about the Victorians - they didn't feel the urge to adopt snappy titles.

Thus in Glasgow in 1874 a group of businessmen formed The Association for Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicity. Had to look that one up. It's mendicity not mendacity. Means begging.

Of course, this was all before the Welfare State and the National Health Service. So no need for such an organisation to exist any more. Only it does.

The title's changed over the years - it became the Glasgow Charity Organisation Society, and then The City of Glasgow Society of Social Service. Finally brevity has caught up with them. If you go up the stairs at 30 George Square next to the Merchants House and above the Chamber of Commerce, you enter a world older office workers will recognise but is seldom now seen. This is not the dashing business milieu of open-plan offices and gently swooshing electronic doors, but tiled corridors with a bit of marble thrown in, and tiny lifts where two folk at once would feel crowded. The doors with opaque glass windows have brass name plates, and one of them, on the fifth floor, announces the Glasgow Care Foundation.

Like me, you've probably not heard of them. Not for the Care Foundation are television advertisements with emaciated babies abroad, or elderly people grimly facing up to cancer. No obscurely-named illness is going to be cured by the Glasgow Care Foundation. Instead they buy cookers. And washing machines. And bedding. It sounds so prosaic, yet it is so much needed in Glasgow today.

Without sounding too trite, the food banks that have grown up might have caught the public imagination, but you need something to cook the food on. Which is why the Glasgow Care Foundation still exists.

I flick through the Jubilee Book of the society, produced in 1924 which states: "Glasgow today shows a great advance from its condition in 1874. But the social problems that face us today, in their essential features, faced the leaders of society at that era. Among them was the ever-recurring problem: how the well-to-do can help their less fortunate fellow-citizens without in any way undermining, and so weakening, their moral character." Ninety years later you could easily write the same paragraph.

Now the main reason you won't have heard of the Glasgow Care Foundation is that they don't have a fund-raiser. Over the decades they were left legacies in wills, or took over the running of various trusts who no longer have the resources to distribute help themselves. They have about £6m invested by wily accountants, and take about £300,000 from the interest, to spend annually on their endeavours. There are only three staff - two of them part-time. Wasting money on grandiose offices or a phalanx of staff is not their way.

But while their roots are steeped in the Victorian era, the work they do is bang up to date. Families in dire need in Glasgow - they must have lived here for at least five years - can get a cooker so that their children are not going to school hungry. A simple washing machine can be provided so that the children can have clean clothes to go to school. Without clean clothes, children will often stay off school for fear of being made fun of, and thus the cycle of deprivation continues.

Nor does the Foundation dole out money to any sob story. First, a person or family has to be referred to the Foundation by a social worker or other worker in the care world. And they don't get cash. The Foundation's welfare office Mary will visit the families and might even tell them to tidy the place up before arranging for a cooker to arrive or for carpets to be fitted.

These are families who have often taken out loans at ruinous rates of interest - we have all seen the slick television advertisements - and are struggling with the debt. If they are on welfare they are bringing up families on amounts that barely cover food, clothing and heating. Buying a new washing machine? Forget it. They won't get a loan for it, and saving up to buy one is simply impossible.

Says Mary: "Some reality programmes give the impression that people on welfare are scroungers. There might be some, but they are a tiny minority. Instead we have people struggling to even provide a table and chairs, so their children are not even used to eating at a table."

You see, giving people social workers doesn't always help them out the mire as the social workers themselves don't have funds to go to. The Care Foundation is the last resort. As their chairman Graeme Whyte tells me: "The sad fact is that even with a Welfare State that is the envy of some, our help is needed more than ever and, with the increasing demand, we need to increase our income to meet the demand. We don't receive any funding from local or national government."

He shows me a card they received after Christmas. The hand-writing reads: "I would like to thank you so much for the Tesco vouchers. I burst into tears when I got them as I have been in dire straits as to where my Christmas dinner was coming from. But thanks to you I can feed myself and my son to the best dinner ever. Best Wishes to you all."

I'm almost bursting into tears myself. Some readers have questioned why The Herald prints pictures on this page of cheery folk in dinner suits. In truth the money being raised every week at these charitable events are proving a real life-line for many, and the work should be recorded and praised. And if you have a spare bob or two, send it to the Glasgow Care Foundation, It won't cure cancer, but it will give instant help to fellow Glaswegians, and if we happily sing about belonging to Glasgow, what better way of showing it.