Meet Sarah Doak, Fort Wayne Office Coordinator

Sarah Doak

Long before becoming our Fort Wayne Office Coordinator, Sarah Doak was interested in helping others. “Hip hop music exposed me to a lot of injustice that I had been sheltered from,” she says. Sarah decided to get her degree in social work and attended IUPUI for her freshman year. During this time, she started volunteering with our partners at Outreach, Inc., a non-profit organization that walks alongside homeless youth, equipping and empowering them to achieve stability and transformation in their lives.

All throughout school, Sarah volunteered with Outreach. Even after transferring to IU Bloomington, she regularly made the trip to Indianapolis and, upon graduating, she applied to be their receptionist. Within a few months, however, Sarah had transitioned to become one of their case managers instead.

For two years, she served in this role at Outreach and the change wrought in her by this work was indelible. “It was a really transformational experience for me. I learned a ton about my life and the world and God and just everything,” Sarah says. “I realized that family is really the most important thing besides God. And that was one of the main reasons my clients were homeless, because of broken family ties and neglect and abuse.”

Sarah knew that she herself was blessed with a large and wonderful family, but most of them lived in Fort Wayne. Over time, she started yearning to be closer to them again. And so, when she saw the opening at our Fort Wayne Legal Clinic office, Sarah decided to apply. “I really love Outreach a lot,” she says, “but I realized that it’s important for me to be with my family in a community that really feels like home.”

Now, Sarah is using her education, experience, and heart for justice to revitalize and expand the Legal Clinic’s pro bono work in northeast Indiana. And she’s doing it in the same building where her great grandfather first opened his dental lab business many decades ago. Sarah loves that her roots run so deep in her new-old city. “I love that Fort Wayne is decently large, but that it still feels like a small community,” she says. “By my third day of work here, I knew the UPS guy because he was my brother’s soccer coach in grade school.”

Just a few weeks ago, Sarah restarted our new client intake sessions in Fort Wayne. She’s busy re-organizing the office space and brainstorming ideas for fundraisers and events to raise community awareness and increase involvement. Part of this means identifying volunteers who are available and willing to assist with our new client intake sessions and taking on volunteer cases. But Sarah is confident that these things will come with time. “We’re open and we’re ready,” she tells me.

If you would like to learn more about our Ft. Wayne office, please visit our website. To learn more about volunteering for our Ft. Wayne office, please contact Sarah Doak at sdoak@nclegalclinic.org.