There are social workers who choose the profession because it sounds meaningful, and there are social workers who choose it because they have no choice: because something happened to them that made any other path impossible. Donna Wilson-Fant is the second kind.
In college, she was assaulted and shot. The details of that violence she does not dwell on; what she speaks of instead is what came after. The hospital bed. The long recovery. The fear and the anger and the sense that the world had revealed itself to be a place where terrible things happened without warning or reason. And then: a social worker. Someone who stayed. Someone who helped her understand that healing was not just physical but emotional, not just medical but human. Someone who saw her not as a case or a victim but as a person whose life, though shattered, could be made whole again.
"That experience made me decide to become a social worker to help marginalized communities," Donna says now, with the kind of plainness that people use when they are describing something so fundamental to their identity that elaboration seems beside the point.
A Career Built at the Margins
Donna's career has been a catalog of society's most vulnerable populations: the people others look away from, the cases that exhaust and discourage, the human problems that resist easy solutions.
She began in Child Protective Services in New Jersey, where the work is relentless and heartbreaking and where burnout is not an occupational hazard but an occupational inevitability. Then she moved to emotionally disturbed adolescents: young people whose pain manifested as rage or withdrawal or self-destruction, who needed someone to believe they could be different than their worst moments suggested.
From there: the HIV/AIDS population, back when that diagnosis still carried a death sentence and a stigma that could be as isolating as the disease itself. Then homeless veterans, men and women who had served their country and been abandoned by it, who slept in shelters or on streets and who struggled with traumas both visible and invisible.
And now, at the Community Living Center at the Atlanta VA, she works in geriatrics: with older veterans in the final chapters of their lives, many of them without family, many of them facing death in an institutional setting far from home.
"Each population has taught me a lot and deepened my passion," she says, though this seems almost an understatement. What she has really done is spend her entire career seeking out the people society has failed, the people for whom the social safety net has proven to be full of holes, the people who need someone to see them not as problems to be managed but as human beings deserving of dignity and care.
What Geriatric Social Work Requires
When Donna describes what it means to be a geriatric social worker, she uses words that sound simple but that, in practice, demand everything: caring, advocacy, patience, dignity.
"It requires a heart connection," she explains, "because older adults need support, especially when family isn't around."
The work is not for everyone. Older adults can be difficult: demanding, ornery, suspicious of help. They have lived long enough to know what they want and to resist being told what to do. They have opinions and expectations and a lifetime of experiences that have taught them not to trust easily.
But Donna does not see this resistance as a problem to be overcome. She sees it as a form of selfhood to be respected. To be old and infirm and dependent is to have lost so much already; to lose one's right to be difficult, to be demanding, to insist on one's preferences even when they are inconvenient, this would be to lose everything.
"You must genuinely want to give of yourself," she tells students who are considering the field. "Check your heart first."
It is advice that sounds almost quaint in an era that treats healthcare as a matter of metrics and outcomes and cost-effectiveness. But Donna knows what the research has not yet fully quantified: that the quality of care is inseparable from the quality of presence, that healing happens not just through interventions but through relationships, that dignity is not a luxury but a necessity.
The Veteran Who Stayed With Her
There was a veteran in the homeless program: one of the many who cycled through, struggling with mental health and housing instability, the kind of case that could easily become routine, another name on a list, another person failed by a system designed to fail people like him.
Donna supported him. She advocated for him. She stayed with him through the setbacks and the small victories and the eventual decline. When he was placed in hospice, she did not consider her work finished. She visited him daily. She was there, every day, until he died.
"It was challenging," she says, "but reaffirmed my commitment to preserving dignity and hope."
This is the kind of story that gets told in social work circles as an example of going above and beyond, of exceptional dedication. But for Donna, it was not exceptional. It was simply what the work required. Because she knows, from her own experience, what it means to be broken and vulnerable and dependent on someone else's willingness to stay. She knows that presence (simple, daily, unglamorous presence) can be the difference between dying alone and dying seen.
The Bridge Between Worlds
Donna describes social workers as bridges: between patients and families, between families and doctors, between the clinical world and the lived reality of people's lives.
"We fill gaps by understanding clinical, social, and personal aspects to provide holistic support and education," she explains.
It is a peculiar professional position, requiring fluency in multiple languages: the language of medicine, the language of bureaucracy, the language of families in crisis, the language of people who have learned not to trust institutions. Social workers are not doctors, but they must understand enough medicine to translate it. They are not family, but they must advocate with the fierceness of family. They are not administrators, but they must navigate systems with the skill of someone who has spent years learning where the cracks are and how to help people avoid falling through them.
At the Community Living Center, Donna plays what she calls "a fine line": advocating for residents while supporting their families and assisting the staff. It requires a kind of diplomatic skill, an ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, to understand that everyone in the system is doing their best and that their best is often not enough, and that her job is to fill the space between what the system provides and what people actually need.
What the System Gets Wrong
After years working with older adults in the VA system, Donna has developed strong opinions about what needs to change. She does not speak in abstractions about healthcare reform or policy initiatives. She speaks concretely, from direct observation.
"Simplifying technology and processes for seniors is crucial," she says. "Many struggle with digital tools like MyChart."
She has watched older veterans (people who flew planes and led troops and rebuilt their lives after war) become defeated by patient portals. She has seen appointments missed not because people did not care about their health but because they could not navigate the online system. She has witnessed isolation deepen not because people chose solitude but because technology created barriers that were, for them, insurmountable.
Her proposed solution is characteristically practical: "Having grassroots professionals or tech caregivers to assist seniors would improve access and reduce isolation."
It is not a flashy fix. It will not transform healthcare or generate headlines. But it is the kind of ground-level thinking that comes from someone who actually works with the population every day, who sees the specific ways the system fails and who believes that systems can be changed, one small improvement at a time, by people who refuse to accept that suffering is inevitable.
The Meaning of the Work
When asked what the word "social worker" means to her personally, Donna returns to the language of her defining experience: "It means caring, advocacy, and helping people through tough situations while preserving their dignity. It's a calling to support others, believing they can overcome challenges with the right help."
That belief (that people can overcome, that they deserve dignity, that with the right support healing is possible) is not naive optimism. It is hard-won knowledge, earned through her own trauma and recovery and through decades of work with people whom others had written off.
She was shot. She could have died. She wanted to give up. And someone (a social worker whose name she may not even remember) refused to let her. Refused to treat her as just another case, another statistic, another victim. Saw her instead as a whole person whose life had value and whose pain deserved witness and whose future was worth fighting for.
And so Donna has spent her career doing the same. For children in danger. For adolescents in crisis. For people dying of AIDS when much of society preferred to pretend they did not exist. For veterans without homes. And now, for older adults in the final stages of life, many of them alone, many of them facing death in an institution, all of them deserving of someone who will stay.
The Transformation of Trauma
There is a kind of person who experiences violence and spends the rest of their life trying to make sense of it: writing about it, talking about it, turning it into art or activism or theory. Donna is not that kind of person. She does not theorize about trauma. She does not write memoirs or give speeches about resilience.
What she does instead is show up. Every day. For people who are suffering. For people who are difficult. For people who are dying. For people whom the system has failed and who have learned not to expect much from the professionals assigned to help them.
She shows up the way someone once showed up for her. And in doing so, she has transformed her own trauma into thousands of small acts of care: acts that will never be documented or celebrated, that happen in hospital rooms and homeless shelters and nursing home corridors, that consist of nothing more dramatic than presence and advocacy and the stubborn insistence that every person, no matter how broken or difficult or near death, deserves to be treated with dignity.
This is what it means to be called to social work. Not to choose it as a career but to be chosen by it, through circumstances that were terrible and undeserved, and to decide that the only response to having been seen and helped and valued in one's own darkest moment is to spend one's life doing the same for others.
Donna Wilson-Fant was shot in college. A social worker helped her heal. And now, at the Atlanta VA, she helps veterans heal: one day, one visit, one preserved moment of dignity at a time.
It is not work that will make her famous or wealthy. But it is work that matters in the most fundamental way: it makes people's lives, in their most vulnerable moments, more bearable. And for someone who knows what it means to be vulnerable and afraid and in need of someone who will stay, there is no work more important than that.
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