Donna Johnson was a longtime administrator and manager for the state of Illinois, but at heart she was always a social worker.
“Her main goal was to help people,” said her friend and former co-worker Edith Newman. “She had a heart for people and she had a heart for doing what was right.”
Mrs. Johnson worked with the Cook County — later Illinois — Department of Public Aid, then with what was then the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities, and finally with the state Department of Children and Family Services.
“She saw this work as congruent with her deep and abiding faith,” said her daughter, Marilyn Johnson, a Cook County Circuit Court judge.
Mrs. Johnson, 80 died of a heart attack Sunday, March 25, in her home in Chicago’s South Side Woodlawn neighborhood, according to her daughter. She lived in Woodlawn all her adult life.
Mrs. Johnson, born in 1932 as Donna Eskridge in Jonesboro, Ark., came to Chicago with her parents when she was a toddler. She attended what was then Mundelein Cathedral High School, which has since closed. She went on to earn a degree in sociology from DePaul University in 1953.
That same year she married Arthur Johnson. She soon went to work as a caseworker for the Cook County Department of Public Aid and then the Illinois Department of Public Aid. She worked her way up there, holding jobs that included assistant office administrator, training supervisor and supervisor of several different offices.
“Her talents were recognized early,” Newman said. “In trying to iron out problems, we always could look to Donna for guidance.”
“In everything she did she went after it in a very determined way,” said Newman, who like Mrs. Johnson spent time as a training supervisor in the agency’s Woodlawn office.
Newman said Mrs. Johnson later ran the Woodlawn office, then was head of Region III, the agency’s south region that included at least six offices, each with 120 to 180 employees.
Beyond her own talents, Mrs. Johnson had a gift for getting the best out of others, according to Mike Belletire, who worked with her as head of operations for Public Aid and later as the director of the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities, now part of the Department of Human Services.
“She had natural insights into how people were motivated and how to discover and cultivate management talent,” Belletire said. “I never found anyone better in all my years in state government.”
Mrs. Johnson moved to the Department of Mental Health about 1984 and worked there until about 1990, when she moved to the Department of Children and Family Services. She was a senior public services administrator there until her retirement at the end of 1994.
Mrs. Johnson was widowed in 1970, but continued to balance her work with raising her daughter and with other interests that included crocheting, embroidering and sewing.
“She sewed beautifully and sewed her own clothes,” said Newman.
When she was in her 50s, Mrs. Johnson was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, but she did not let that deter her from doing the things she wanted to do. That included commuting to Springfield two or three days a week as part of her work.
“She understood little steps accomplished were better than grandiose plans left undone,” said Jeanette Veen, who also worked with her at Public Aid.
Mrs. Johnson is also survived by a granddaughter; a great-granddaughter; and her longtime close friend Paul Cornell.
Services were held.
