June 11, 2025

Making a Better Tomorrow for our Community

Donna Spasic has spent her career caring for seniors in our community and across Ontario.
A new planned gift from Donna will help St. Joe’s care for our community, too.

We often encounter people in our lives who inspire, mentor and shape us into the person we become. For Donna Spasic, she credits her parents and her employers for instilling the importance of community, integrity and hard work. Those values helped drive Donna’s 53-year career in the long-term care sector in Hamilton and its surrounding areas.

“Everything that I’ve learned about looking after and supporting people, and giving back to the community, I learned from my family at an early age,” says Donna who is the Owner of Madison Village in Stoney Creek, Westhills Care Centre in St. Catharines, and the Managing Director at Hampton Terrace in Burlington and Tufford Manor Retirement Home in St. Catharines. “My dad would often tell my sister and I, ‘There are three things you can do in life – you can watch things happen, you can let things happen, or you can make things happen. You’re the only one that can decide which way you choose to go.’”

Donna’s connection to the Hamilton community started at age 11 when her family (including her younger sister Gordana and brother Zelko) moved from the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina) to Canada, sponsored by her maternal aunt. A few years later, Donna’s entrepreneurial father opened a delicatessen, a hardware store and later on, a family eatery on Ottawa Street named Logans Restaurant.

While attending Delta Secondary School in Hamilton, Donna worked as a dishwasher at Victoria Nursing Home each weekend and at Blake Nursing Home seven evenings a week to help her parents pay off their home, save money to start the family businesses, and support her schooling and that of her siblings.

After pursuing her studies in Nutrition and Long-Term Care Administration, Donna worked in several long-term care facilities. In 1993, she opened her own company and provided her consulting and management expertise to a number of long-term care facilities across Ontario, including the development of Edgewater Gardens in Dunnville, Ontario. She looked after her family’s restaurant when her father passed away from cancer in 2004, running the business with her mother until 2010. After Donna’s sister passed away from cancer in 2010, Donna decided to sell the family restaurant.

Following decades of industry experience and with a well-honed understanding of the growing need for senior care facilities, Donna is now focused on building a new facility in Stoney Creek with construction to start in 2026.

Donna’s deep sense of connection to her community hasn’t changed all that much since her days of washing dishes. She maintains an extraordinarily high standard of cleanliness and care at her fully-accredited facilities and personally makes time to meet residents and their family members.

Blending compassion with care is something Donna says she learned from her parents and from time spent at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton over the years, too. Donna’s son, Aleksandar (Sasha) was born in 1980 at St. Joe’s and she still remembers the kindness and wonderful care she received by the doctors and nurses. Before they passed on, both of her parents and her sister were cared for at various hospitals, but Donna says the approach to care at St. Joe’s was different.

“When I would take them to St. Joe’s, there was always a personal component tied to their care,” says Donna. “I believe it’s because the care reflects the mission of the Sisters of St. Joseph. It’s that human element that is so important when you’re connecting with your patients. I’ve always felt that at St. Joe’s.  Even now, when I visit the Hospital, I’m treated as a person, not just a patient.”

To ensure that personalized approach to care continues, and to give back to the community that her family loved so dearly, Donna, in addition to her ongoing in life donations, has left a generous bequest of $3 million to St. Joe’s through her Will for priority equipment needs for surgery and diagnostic imaging. Additional future commitments to healthcare will also be made to the community beyond St. Joe’s.

“We, the people of Hamilton, need to be that agent of change for the community. If I can help provide our health care professionals with much needed support to help them achieve their goals and make a better future for all of us, that is a great legacy to leave behind.”