46 D'MENSIONS MAGAZINE D'YOUVILLE UNIVERSITY 47 The rain is pounding, and the low roar of the thunder is both heard and felt on this unusually hot and humid mid-July day in Rochester. The warmth has made its way inside the un-air conditioned convent, so DelSanto serves lunch on the covered back porch, where there’s at least a breeze to cut the sticky air. Her scholarship — awarded annually to upperclassmen nursing students who, like her, demonstrate a commitment to community service in addition to their commitment to the healthcare industry — is the reason for this midsummer interview. But there’s so much more to learn about the 1975 D’Youville College graduate, and the previous month’s run-in with ICE is just the tip of the iceberg. Her story begins in Poughkeepsie, where she was the oldest of six siblings to a Scottish mother who was a nurse and an Italian father who was an undertaker (they worked on opposite sides of healthcare, she jokes). DelSanto knew at an early age that she wanted to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a nurse — both of her parents were keen on community service and giving back, and nursing felt like a logical step toward a life of service. DelSanto’s first job was in a hospital as a ward clerk in the same hospital where her mother worked. “They’d always say, ‘Are you Peggy’s daughter? You have big shoes to fill,’” DelSanto recalls. “It was because my mother was so compassionate and such a good nurse. I was a little nervous about [going into the profession], because it would be difficult to live up to her as the model. But all my female cousins on her side of the family were nurses here ... maybe it was genetics.” DelSanto learned more about the profession at D’Youville, but the campus is also where she got her first taste of social justice. The Vietnam War had already ushered in a new era of progressive change on college campuses across the country, and DelSanto was eager to join the fight against other non-military causes while a student. She was part of a small lettuce and grape boycott against the school’s cafeteria director, because those products came from Cuba, where farmers and farmworkers were being treated unfairly. It wasn’t long after this that DelSanto began to see religion in a different light as well. She attended a Catholic high school growing up, attended a Catholic college at D’Youville and worked in Catholic-run hospitals. But in her early 20s, she felt like her church didn’t have the same passion for social change that she had — she felt like her church didn’t have the same drive to help those less fortunate that she had. “I didn’t see the church caring for people who were poor,” she says. “I understood the readings. I understood the message. But I wasn’t seeing the actions. I was asking how was it we were really living our values.” So, she walked away from the church. In today’s terms, it was more like she “ghosted” the church. “I never walked away from God. That’s an important distinction,” she says. “It was organized religion. I still very much had a relationship with God … I just questioned the structures that were perhaps made by man.” The late 70s saw DelSanto leave New York for the Midwest and the Southwest, joining friends in Kentucky and, later, Texas to see the country and find work with the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), an organization created by the Nixon Administration to help fight poverty through work in community projects. DelSanto says she and her golden retriever left Kentucky for a town near Austin, Texas to find work helping the area’s poor. After being told by one woman, “We don’t have any poor people here,” she found work assisting pregnant teenagers in a small Mexican-American community in that area. She didn’t speak Spanish, but DelSanto was welcomed with open arms into the community — her current advocacy for Latino immigrants can be traced to her experience in Texas. “I learned their stories, and the older women there treated me like a granddaughter,” she says. “I got invited to quinceaneras and all kinds of events.” VISTA workers received $75 a week — barely enough to live on even in the 70s — and DelSanto had to apply for Food Stamps to help make ends meet. She recalls experiencing racism (despite being and appearing white) for the first time, which had a profound effect on her to this day. “My last name is DelSanto, and that was a Latino-sounding last name,” she recalls. “So I was going to use [the Food Stamps], and I was treated poorly. They thought I was Hispanic, or that I was married to a Hispanic man. I remember wanting to tell them that I was a VISTA worker from New York, but I’m so grateful that I didn’t, because I realized I could leave Texas and never have to experience that kind of racism against me again. But my friends there, this was their home. This was their life. This would always be their skin color and their language. And I just felt really privileged to be in solidarity with them. “I remember thinking, ‘This is what they feel every day.’ And I’ve never lost sight of that.” DelSanto would eventually become a recruiter for VISTA and the Peace Corps, and that job eventually led her back to New York, where she took a position in Rochester, traveling to colleges around the state to recruit new volunteers. Upon her return, she was asked to help a coworker secure a mass card for her recently deceased father, and when she did, DelSanto met a young priest who — after a two-hour off-the-cuff conversation — was convinced he found the next nurse to run his church’s medical clinic. That clinic was located in an abandoned building that was being restored “board by board” so it could serve the city’s uninsured. DelSanto joined the effort to revitalize the building and would end up running the clinic for the next 11 years. The Sisters of Saint Joseph convent in the South Wedge community of Rochester, where Donna DelSanto and three other sisters live with a handful of college students seeking to “live intentionally” while in school. Sister Donna DelSanto pictured recently with School of Nursing Dean Dr. Shannon McCrory- Churchill and two students who received the nursing scholarship bearing DelSanto’s name, Sydney Torrey and Gavin Izard.
