When she saw a need for a center for emotionally troubled children in Salt Lake City, she started one.

When she moved to Holladay and noticed no church there to reflect her beliefs, she helped found it.

It was a pattern throughout Agnes Plenk’s life: When she saw a need, she filled it.

Plenk, a psychologist widely known as Agi, died Dec. 31 at the age of 95.

Though Plenk wasn’t originally from Utah, she spent most of her life working to improve her communities here. She’s perhaps best known for founding The Children’s Center, which provides comprehensive mental health care to young children and now serves more than 1,800 families a year. She also wrote several books.

"It is such a gift to our community that families have a place that they can pick up the phone, ask for help and have their child be helped," said Kristina Hindert, the center’s medical director, who knew Plenk for 33 years. "It’s an incredible legacy she’s given us."

It was a center Plenk grew from humble beginnings.After she and her husband, Henry Plenk, moved to Holladay in 1952, they helped create The Cottonwood Club, the Holladay Community Church (now the Holladay United Church of Christ)and a preschool there.

Seeing a growing need for a specialized preschool for children struggling with emotional issues, Plenk went on to found, in 1963, The Children’s Center, a place that used group therapy and play techniques she had developed over the years.

Hindert said in the 1950s many doctors provided child therapy just by meeting with parents, but Plenk believed it was crucial to observe and work with children.

"She really wanted children to be heard, and she felt they were trying to talk to us through their behavior, through their drawings, through their play," Hindert said. She said Plenk was driven by a sense of social justice rather than pity."I think children really liked that in her, that when she would have a conversation with a child there was an equality in the way she approached the child, the expectation that the child could respond and help her find them what they needed."

In a short autobiography Plenk wrote for The Children’s Center, she said her training working with children began in high school when she volunteered in a day-care center in Vienna, Austria, where she grew up. There, she worked under the supervision of Anna Freud, whose father was Sigmund Freud. She said Anna Freud "shared ideas and helped us to overcome traditional prejudices, like children ‘should be seen and not heard,’ being polite is most important, or saying ‘I’m sorry,’ even if you aren’t."

It was just the beginning of her education.

Plenk was born in Budapest, but her family moved to Yugoslavia and then Vienna because of political upheavals. Her father was a lawyer/journalist and her mother was a suffragette.

In Vienna, Plenk met her husband and became involved in radical leftist politics. In 1938, the couple fled to the U.S. after Hitler took over Austria.

They settled in Chicago, where Henry finished medical school at Northwestern University and she worked several jobs, including as a research assistant at The Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. It was there she decided to become a psychologist. Plenk went on to eventually earn a bachelor’s degree in psychology, a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in educational psychology.

Son Bruce Plenk, solar energy coordinator for the city of Tucson, Ariz., said his mother "started working as a professional woman at a time there weren’t many working women in Utah and there were even fewer working women in psychology or psychiatry, and she was kind of a pioneer in that sense."