Tennessee McDonald's manager has fostered 91 teen girls in 15 years

Her next few foster kids sometimes cussed her out, made messes or refused to follow house rules. One girl punched her in the shoulder.

Sometimes the agency she works with placed as many as six teenage girls in her house at the same time.

Still, single mom Donna Neal persisted, taking in a total of 91 teens over the past 15 years.

Neal has done that with two secret weapons. First, her backstory includes growing up in public housing and getting pregnant at 16, a story many girls connect with.

Her other secret sauce: Neal, a fast-food worker and manager her whole life, gets most of the girls jobs at the Hendersonville, Tennessee, McDonald's she runs.

"That's very important," said Claire Moses, an executive at the Youth Villages agency that places teens in Neal's house.

"It gives our kids purpose," Moses said, "and if she’s there working with them, that feels really good for a kid."

Several of Neal's foster children — most call her "Mom" — said she mixes tough love, a big heart and Big Macs to launch some of the state's most challenging foster kids into living independently.

"She's hard in a good way. When I got there, she threw it to me straight," said Niyjae Christensen, 19, who still lives with Neal.

"Over the first few months, I grew to love her more and more," Christensen said. "After a while, she became my mom, my comfort place. God gave me a good match."

Part of what made that match so good, she said, is that she related to challenges Neal had growing up: "She came from where I came from."

Neal came from public housing about 1.2 miles southeast — but seemingly a world away — from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Neal said she often saw shootings and drug deals, things her dad and her stepmom urged her to avoid. She eventually ran track and played basketball in high school, but dropped out when she got pregnant at 16.

Her daughter, Nicole, was born on Christmas Eve 1982.

Neal started working at fast-food restaurant Mrs. Winner's, and she moved with the baby to their own apartment in a nearby public housing complex. Neal got married in 1989 and lived in a small house for nearly 10 years before the marriage ended and she moved back into public housing.

About a year after that, a McDonald's manager walked into Mrs. Winner's, told Neal she had a great personality and offered her a $35,000-a-year job as a McDonald's manager trainee — a $6,000-a-year bump over what she was making. Neal has been with McDonald's ever since.

In the late 1990s, after problems arose in their house, Neal's niece and nephew went into state custody, which broke her heart. Her mom's best friend was a foster parent, and she suggested that Neal become one.

The idea intrigued her, especially if she would foster kids from public housing.

"I went back and looked at my life, looked at my nieces' and nephews' lives, and I knew I could make a difference," Neal said.

"I can identify with the anger, the bitterness, the unstableness. I could relate to them. I was them."

Her first foster daughter, the 16-year-old who ran away now and then, moved in with her in late 2010. Sometimes, the girl disappeared for a few days at a time. She, on occasion, would refuse to do chores or follow house rules.

The teen sometimes even cursed at her, getting particularly defiant on her birthday and on Christmas, usually because she hoped for a call from her birth parents that never came.

"I thought I was ready," Neal said, "but that girl gave me a run for my money."

Neal found herself raising her voice sometimes, especially after the girl raised hers. After a few months, though, Neal tried a different approach: She asked the teen about her birth family, what she missed the most, and how Neal might be supportive.

"Then she started to open up to me, got more vulnerable," Neal said, "and she started trusting me."

Neal started using a combination of firm boundaries and genuine curiosity to guide her approach to fostering teen girls.

Kaelyn “KK” Redd, 21, said Neal was "very straightforward" in communicating the house rules when Redd arrived in 2021.

After that, Redd said, "we stayed up almost the whole night talking. It was very welcoming, something I hadn’t experienced before that."

Things got trickier when Redd started working for her foster mom at McDonald's. The two butted heads nearly from the start.

"She was a lot stricter on me," Redd said, "because I wasn’t just a [worker], I also was her kid."

Their relationship smoothed out when the two started working different shifts. And Redd, who now lives in a house in Nashville with her fiancee, said she developed skills and a work ethic at McDonald's that helped her launch her own small insurance company.

"Everything Mom's done has led me to where I’m at now," Redd said.

Lyon Leadership Group, the McDonald's franchise organization that owns the store where Neal works, has been supportive of her efforts to hire her foster daughters.

"Donna didn’t just manage a team, she built a community rooted in care and respect," said Tommy Shipley, Lyon's operations director. "She gave her foster kids structure, confidence and hope through real opportunity."

Neal, 60, stopped working full time for McDonald's last year. She now is turning her attention toward fulfilling a dream to build a 10-bedroom foster home, with a lounge, prayer room, recreation room and a big yard.

As those plans develop, Neal said, she hopes to keep being a foster mom for about 10 years. The role has given her great satisfaction and a gigantic family.

"My kids are great kids," she said. "I get joy out of seeing lives being changed."