Donata Francescato

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Donata Francescato (born April 17, 1944, in Arona, Italy) is an Italian psychologist and academic who trained in the United States. She is known for her work in community psychology, focusing on sex roles, communes, and empowerment at personal, group, organizational, and community levels. Her efforts helped make community psychology a recognized field in Italian universities in 1985.

She is the Scientific Director of the post-graduate School of Specialization in clinical community psychology and psychotherapy at ASPIC (Association for the Psychological Development of the Individual and the Community). Previously, she was a Full Professor of Community Psychology at the University of Rome and retired in 2014.

Francescato earned a BA in French literature (Rice University, 1967), an MA in French literature (Rice University, 1970), and a PhD in clinical psychology (University of Houston, 1972). She did a post-doctoral fellowship at Brandeis University in the Sociology department.

Back in Italy, she wrote the first Italian textbook on community psychology and co-founded Effe, a feminist magazine (1972–1982). She also helped establish the European Network of Community Psychologists, which led to the European Association for Community Psychology. She serves on editorial boards of several journals in the field.

She helped develop online teaching methods to share professional skills using computer-supported collaborative learning. She created programs to empower individuals, groups, organizations, and communities, including initiatives for women, immigrants, and people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and she also evaluates how well these methods work.

Her work centers on three main areas: women’s studies (sex roles, gender differences among activists and politicians, dual‑career families, childrearing, and separation/divorce); aging and caregiving in families (including caregiver and intergenerational dynamics); and theory-based intervention methods that promote empowerment. She also explores how aging affects intergenerational relationships, such as relationships among grandparents, parents, and adult grandchildren, and their impact on wellbeing.

Her latest English-language work summarizes what community psychology can teach for the future and how its methods can help bridge political and social divides. Francescato has published about 25 books and numerous articles.