Career Social Worker Gives Back to School

Sarah (Sally) Flagg Haake, MSW ’62, experienced the length and breadth of social work during her career. Haake, from St. Charles, Missouri, credits her MU social work degree with preparing her for a diverse and successful five-decade career. She said, "I had a very satisfying career from 1962 to 2004."

After graduation, Haake started her career on a demonstration project in Webster Groves, Mis-souri. Now married and with two careers to consider, Haake, her career, and her family did not stay in one place for long. First came a move to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she was a psychi-atric social worker with the Moccasin Bend Psychiatric Hospital. Next, she moved to Alabama tak-ing a similar position with the Mobile Mental Health Clinic. The opportunity to work with adop-tions for children evacuated from Vietnam took her north to Pontiac, Michigan, where she also worked as a school social worker.

Returning south to Texas, Haake joined forces with Human Affairs International in the Dallas area serving as a social worker in their Employee Assistance Program. While in Dallas, Haake said she experienced the most satisfying job of her varied career, working with adoptions at the Presbyteri-an Children's Home and Service Agency. She interacted directly with birth mothers and with moth-ers who had to emancipate their children, but the majority of her work was with older children in the foster care system.

She also conducted workshops and counseled adoptive families, which included moderating panels of birth mothers who helped prepare families to receive children placed for adoption. Haake said, "We found that this helped adoptive families understand the situations of birth mothers and why children were being placed for adoption." Later she would become Social Services Director for the Psychiatric Institute of America, Fort Worth, Texas, working with acute care children and adults with addiction-related disorders.

In 1991 Haake moved to St. Louis to take a position as a psychiatric social worker with Personal Performance Consultants, now Magellan Behavioral Health, where she worked until her retirement in 2004.

Haake made a gift to create a charitable gift annuity that will one day provide scholarships for MU School of Social Work students. A charitable gift annuity provides a lifetime income at a rate based on the age of the annuitant. The gift creating the annuity remains invested until after the lifetime of the annuitant, at which time it is available for use by the School of Social Work.

Haake said she made her gift to help young people and help the social work profession. She said, "I had a wonderful career in social work. I want to assist others to obtain a degree if they have the heart for working in the field of social work. Student loans and the economy make it difficult to go into the field, and I was lucky enough to be able to make this gift. I want to assist students to earn their MSW, which is essential now for the practice of social work."