Bob Peay selected to be the 2017 VCU School of Social Work Alumni Star
Robert W. Peay
1974 Master of Social Work
School of Social Work
Bob Peay experienced the despair of watching high school classmates return from the Vietnam War bearing life-changing emotional scars.
“Messed up,” says Peay, who served in the Air Force during that era. “Psychological problems that impacted their families. Broken families and those who were abandoned on base.” Sadly, for the veterans of that era, he says, “there was no good counseling at that time.”
Peay also witnessed social challenges among other populations during his four years in the Air Force — his first foray into a truly integrated society. He realized that “we all want the same things in life. We have more in common than we do differences.”
After leaving the military, Peay enrolled at Virginia Union University as a social sciences student. There, he also witnessed poverty, unemployment and other social challenges facing minority groups in Richmond, Virginia. It was clear that he needed to go into social work. He never regretted it.
Peay began his career championing youth who otherwise would have fallen through the cracks in the early 1970s. At Richmond Opportunities Industrialization Center, a nonprofit designed to build job and social skills for underprivileged young adults, Peay helped junior high and high school students learn the importance of employment, job search techniques, interviewing skills and dressing professionally.
In 1978, Peay, who had earned his M.S.W. from VCU four years earlier, joined his alma mater. As a field instructor and field liaison in the School of Social Work, he received three grants to work with local elementary, middle and high school students to address issues of absenteeism, poor performance and behavioral issues. “They were vulnerable,” he says. “Structure and maturity weren’t there for them. They had socialization issues.” Using grant funds, he placed M.S.W. students in those schools to work with the children.
Peay, who also served as adviser to the Black Student Association, spent 27 years as a faculty member in the VCU School of Social Work, retiring in 2005. He was a member of numerous local and state boards, commissions and mental health agencies. Along with colleague Bob Schneider, Ph.D., he established the Social Work Administration, Planning, and Policy Practice Scholarship in 2004 to support a full- or part-time M.S.W. macro concentration student.
Post-retirement, Peay ran a construction business that built affordable housing and commercial space leased to state and nonprofit agencies. He has since retired from that venture. He travels extensively, and social work is still a guiding force in his life. “You can learn so much from other cultures,” he says. “We can learn about how they handle health care, transportation and infrastructure.”
Peay credits VCU with giving him a solid academic foundation and strong social consciousness.
“I had a wonderful educational experience at VCU,” he says. “The educational program led to full-time employment as the director of youth employment programs for the city of Richmond and later as a full-time assistant professor in the School of Social Work.”
Categories Alumni, Community, Faculty and staff