Neighborhood Ministries Coordinator, Donna Neste

Donna Pususta Neste is Mount Olive’s Neighborhood Ministries Coordinator. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota with a B.S. in Education and has served as Mount Olive’s Neighborhood Ministries Coordinator since 1984. Until the year 2000, Donna’s position was part time, but in January of that year, she began this work full time. From 1982 until 2000 she worked part-time at her sister’s Phillips neighborhood café. She lives in the Phillips neighborhood, nine blocks from Mount Olive.

Because Donna grew up in a working poor family and has straddled the professional and working worlds for so many years, she has a real understanding of the working poor and their struggles. Her mission focuses on giving the children of the poverty-stricken neighborhoods which surround Mount Olive a sense of hope for their futures, to help in guiding them to make the right decisions, to encourage them in their gifts, and to help them know that they are precious and loved in the eyes of God.

Donna works to accomplish this mission through the programs she has created within Mount Olive Neighborhood Ministries: Way to Goals Tutoring, Jobs After School, Bible for Big Kids, and more. Donna sees education as a key factor in helping these children, and several of them have been in one or more of these programs for years. Donna introduced a program created by the Minneapolis Public Schools that helps area youth focus on the goal of attending college.

She sees violence as a real problem in the lives of area youth and has focused on helping to keep them out of gangs. With the help of dedicated Mount Olive volunteers, the Bible For Big Kids program focuses on the non-violent life and teachings of Jesus, and explore ways to solve differences non-violently.

Donna serves on the neighborhood Weed and Seed Steering Committee and the Bread for the World Metro Committee. She is a member of Every Church a Peace Church, Women Against Military Madness, and MICAH (an interfaith housing alliance). Her favorite hobby is reading and her interests are theology, politics, peace and justice issues, the media, and fighting the causes of poverty, hunger, and homelessness. Donna is a widow with a college-aged son, and she has a real passion for baseball.