NORTHAMPTON — Sue Stubbs isn’t afraid of taking risks — in fact, she welcomes it.

In the 1980s, near the beginning of Stubb’s 44-year career as ServiceNet’s CEO, there weren’t any homeless shelters to serve Northampton’s unsheltered population. The state saw homelessness as a problem in cities, Stubbs said, where unsheltered people slept on the streets, rather than in the woods as many do in the western part of the state.

When a group of advocates and unsheltered people camped out in front of Northampton City Hall to demand more social services for the homeless, the Northampton mayor at the time, David B. Musante, called up Stubbs and asked if her company, then called Franklin/Hampshire Community Mental Health Care Center, would open homeless shelters with newly allocated local and state funding.

During the early years of ServiceNet, the nonprofit human services agency ran day programs and group homes, called halfway houses, for people with mental illness. Both Stubbs and the nonprofit board were hesitant to take on a new venture, but it wasn’t long until their point of view changed.

“Most of the nonprofit organizations only had staffing and only had systems that operated Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m,” said Stubbs, who stepped down as ServiceNet’s president and CEO on Jan 1. “We were a 24/7 organization because we had group homes, which were not that different from shelters … That’s another example of stepping up to try to fill an unmet need that comes to our attention in one way or another.”

In 1983, ServiceNet opened homeless shelters under the new name Valley Programs. It was the beginning of a new organizational culture, one that Stubbs would continue to foster for the next 40 years.

“If you interview the whole leadership team, and you ask them, ‘There’s a new opportunity to open X, Y, Z program. Should we go for it or not?’” Stubbs said. “They go, ‘Yes, we go for it. We have to go for it. We don’t do it. Who else will?’”

Stubbs has lived through a plethora of mergers and name changes as ServiceNet grew from 25 employees running two programs in 1980 to more than 1,900 staff members supporting over 100 programs across all four counties of western Massachusetts. She is stepping down from her leadership role to allow ServiceNet’s Chief Operating Officer Bruno Calouro to take the helm. It’s a transition the company has worked on for the past two years, one that keeps Stubbs’ entrepreneurial spirit intact.

“Sometimes, people worry about risk, and risk is kind of weird, because sometimes it’s more risky not to do something than it is to do it,” Stubbs said.

With a background in social work and psychology, Stubbs was working as a clinical supervisor at bilingual mental health nonprofit Gandara Center in Springfield when ServiceNet put out a job posting for a clinical director to help train and advise group home staff. In 1980, one of Stubbs’ friends suggested she apply to avoid the grueling commute to Springfield.

She worked as the clinical director for a little over a year when the CEO at the time stepped down, and the nonprofit’s board suggested Stubbs apply for the job. While she had the social work and clinical experience, the business side of the organization was new territory.

“I kind of learned gradually over time as we grew,” Stubbs said. “I took a lot of courses in business and management leadership training, even though I don’t have a formal degree in management or business.”

ServiceNet began merging with other nonprofits early on in Stubbs’ time as CEO, which she credits to the fractured system of mental and disability health care of the time. After the U.S. District Court approved the Brewster Consent Decree in 1978, which prevented institutions from keeping patients against their will, Massachusetts began to reallocate funds from state institutions like the Northampton State Hospital to community-based programs like the Hampshire Association for Mental Health — ServiceNet’s first name.

As these small community organizations struggled with funding or lost state contracts, ServiceNet would integrate the entire organization into their own, saving money on administrative costs, bringing in new staff and expanding its service area. ServiceNet’s growth, Stubbs said, happened organically.

“The most important reason is that for clients, it makes it easier to do this sort of one-stop shopping,” she explained. “They get one intake done, tell their whole family history, and then they get the services under one roof. It made it much more user-friendly.”

Stubbs also credits ServiceNet’s success to the talented employees brought on from other companies after each merger. It’s these new members who helped generate innovative programming, along with alleviating all the grant writing, fundraising coordination and contract work that Stubbs once had to do all by herself. In more recent years, ServiceNet built a new corporate headquarters at Village Hill in Northampton.

“People have said to me, ‘Your organization has grown so much. You must have to work so hard to run this giant thing,’” Stubbs said. “But the larger we’ve gotten, the more qualified, talented, bright, motivated people have come on board. So in many ways, my job has gotten easier because there’s more people to share the running of the organization.”

As ServiceNet grew, so did its programs. Many of the nonprofit’s services, Stubbs said, have similar stories to the organization’s homeless shelter expansion. When the state needed an organization to treat a young girl with both developmental disabilities and mental illness, ServiceNet took her in and began their developmental disabilities services. When parents of patients with brain injury sued the state for putting their family members in nursing homes against their will, ServiceNet accepted these new patients and placed them in age-appropriate programs.

When DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) treatments showed very effective results in people with severe mental illness, Stubbs convinced insurance companies to pay for outpatients to have the procedure, becoming the first organization in western Massachusetts to offer the treatment.

Some programs, however, ventured outside of the nonprofit’s model and took trial and error to perfect, like the therapeutic and vocational farming program at Prospect Meadow Farm in Hatfield. Stubbs said ServiceNet had previously held farming vocational programs through Berkshire Vocational. The concept of a ServiceNet farm grew out of outdoor hobbies like gardening and tending to the organization’s two llamas showing benefits for many group home clients.

The success of these activities inspired a new investment, one that Vice President of Community Relations Amy Timmins said took a while to figure out. Timmins said Stubbs takes a very fearless approach to new programs. Her philosophy, she said, is “we’ll try something, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll figure out what we need to do next, but we’re not going to be afraid of trying something new that shows promise.” Now, ServiceNet owns three farms, two in Hatfield and one in Pittsfield.

Stubbs is quite proud of all the programs at ServiceNet she’s overseen over the years. While she won’t be supervising anymore, she plans to say at ServiceNet in a smaller role developing innovative approaches to helping clients. Her passion for social work and her love of the organization she helped build hasn’t dwindled, not even after 44 years.

“I’m going to continue to be working to support the organization in various ways, not as the CEO, obviously, and definitely not anywhere near full time, but I’ve been committed to this organization for a long time, and I’m going to be ensuring that I provide whatever support I can to make sure that the transition is successful,” Stubbs said.