Mary Faith Sterk follows a clear mission: to make a difference helping others, especially those who cannot help themselves.

Sterk is the director of social work at Scott and White Hospital in Temple. She manages 44 staff members who, like her, seek to work at the creative forefront of the health care profession and to help others along the way.

Sterk was born in Traverse City, a small harbor town dotting Northwestern Michigan, which overlooks the West Arm waters of Lake Michigan's Grand Traverse Bay. When she was young, her Harvard-educated father--part aeronautical engineer, part rancher--moved the family south to Texas to the farming town of Keller, near Fort Worth.

"We were leading a rural life but involved in a lot of creative endeavors," says Sterk. The family had season tickets to the opera and frequented big city musical theatre. "They instilled in us a love for fine arts."

In high school, she was a competitive diver and studied dance. During summers, she ran a swimming business and taught swimming to kids who "came from all over." Money she earned funneled into her college savings account. Then came the time to choose a school to attend.

"In my family on my Dad's side, there's a long history to the Methodist Church and connections to Southwestern. My grandmother kept saying, 'Now, Mary Faith, remember who you are. Check out Southwestern.' Coming from a small town, Southwestern actually felt really good. It had that personal touch that made you feel like you weren't going to get lost. I still liked having the country around me."

Sterk was given a Presidential Scholarship to attend Southwestern and arrived thinking she would major in music. "That changed on my second day."

"I was looking around at all these new people, and I said to myself, 'I'm not going to lock myself up in a practice room for hours when there were all these people to see.' It sounded too solitary when I had all this breadth before me."

She settled, instead, on a double major in psychology and theatre--a wise and life-changing choice. In a production of "The Lion in Winter," which chronicles the life of Henry II and Eleanor of Acquitaine, she was cast to play the lead opposite a fellow student named Rob Sterk. The two fell in love and married years later.

She also took an introductory psychology class from Dr. Doug Hooker. "Dr. Hooker always has been one of these really engaging professors who makes things so interesting. He challenged you. The choice to major in psychology was very intuitive. There's something artistic as well as scientific about psychology."

Her senior year of college, Sterk pursued an internship at Austin State Hospital that was born out of Dr. Hooker's psychology internship program. That internship was the beginning of a long career in social work.

"Those internships are still some of the most unique opportunities for undergraduate students. At most places, you usually don't get an internship until you reach your master's program."

She officially joined the Austin State Hospital staff after she graduated from Southwestern in 1972. She worked as a secretary in the volunteer services division for a few months, then was promoted to a social worker.

"That was back in the days before there was social work licensing. I had an opportunity to learn the profession." She continued her work at the hospital in various capacities. Meanwhile, she attended Our Lady of the Lake University of San Antonio to obtain her master's degree in social work.

Following graduate school, she took a position directing a transitional and work program for people with mental illnesses. "We help them learn how to take care of each other. They moved out into the community as a group." That position evolved into a unique opportunity for Sterk and her husband, who owned and managed a commercial landscaping business.

"We developed an on-the-job training program for people with chronic mental illness," she says. "We had a really great crew of folks that worked with us. I did manual labor with them for years."

In 1985, Sterk went to work at the Williamson County Health District to implement a state-funded grant that looked at health risk reduction. It was this work that carried her into the public health profession.

In 1986, the state of Texas passed county indigent health care legislation which charged Texas counties to provide health care for the poorest of the poor. That same year, Sterk was hired to run the program for the Williamson County Health Department. "It was a good time for putting together the bases for what's going on today with managed care." Her innovative work in developing model programs with a visionary and hard-working staff won the agency a national primary health care award in 1990.

One year later, she made her last move to Scott & White Healthcare System to oversee the social work department. "I'm a very lucky person. We're allowed to be creative. In the health care profession, that's not always the case." She and her staff have broken barriers to put in place new technologies to expand access to information on health, child care, subsistence programs, and other community services. Currently, a hi-tech networked infrastructure called PALADIN is being developed, which stands for Partners and Leaders in an Automated Database Information Network. Sterk explains that PALADIN was a term used ages ago to refer to the legendary Knights of the Round Table who would rescue people from danger. Awards have showered both her and her staff.

Outside of work, Sterk serves on the Boards of the United Way and of the Georgetown Project, a community effort to ensure community services are made available to people in need. She also rises at 5 a.m. with husband Rob for daily gym outings, where weight-training and cardiovascular work keeps her in top form to play the sport she loves--soccer.

"It's important for all of us to take responsibility for our own health care, but having assistance available when it's needed is important too."

She said aside from the fun of four years of musicals and an enriching academic experience, the most important lesson she took away from Southwestern was "the value of human dignity, worth and service. Those are values that Southwestern still has today. That hasn't changed."