A Penchant for Numbers, A Love of Words

If you’ve been paying attention to the various team members and consultants we’ve profiled on this site, you might get the feeling that it’s an organization comprised entirely of word nerds—people with several advanced degrees in applied linguistics, who probably spend their free time traveling to global Scrabble competitions—sometimes just as spectators… and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. SIL LEAD does tend to attract a certain kind of person, and even those of us who don’t hold doctorates in parsing phonemes and matriculating morphemes (or whatever it’s called) are still lovers of words.

But as SIL LEAD has grown in size and complexity, the need has grown for team members with a variety of essential skills. One of those people is Valori Maresco, who heads up SIL LEAD’s accounting department.

Valori did not start out her life wanting to handle finances for a small, D.C.-based nonprofit. After spending her college career following an assortment of interests to arrive at a bachelor’s degree in consumer economics, she then followed her long term dream of becoming a missionary. For just under three years she lived and worked in Central America as an administrative assistant in a church-planting organization.

Valori (pictured right) with friends in Central America.

Valori put her six years of Spanish study to use and quickly became fluent. She was doing what she loved in a place she really enjoyed. In fact, it’s quite possible that Valori would still be a missionary in some exotic locale if she hadn’t attended a conference in Texas at the end of 1985.

There she met Kenneth, the man who would become her Guatemala-to-Maryland pen pal, and then—after another encounter at yet another conference—her fiancée. The two were married not long after, and her husband (who at the time was working in marketing and advertising) entered training to become a pastor. Valori discovered a new vocation as the two quickly began to build a family, and she took on the challenging work of raising five boys: first as their stay-at-home mom, then as their teacher as well. 

Valori with her family at her mother-in-law’s 80th birthday celebration.

Despite all this, Valori somehow also found time to do volunteer church work alongside her husband. Eventually, as her boys began to grow up, she began to work outside the home as the Women’s Ministry Director of a large church.

It was during her last year in this position that she decided to go back to school to study accounting in hopes of finding a part-time job in the field that would enable her to continue studying and provide on-the-job training. 

Around this time her daughter-in-law, Stacey, was working at SIL LEAD as Paul’s assistant—first in D.C., and then remotely as she earned a Masters in Linguistics out on the West Coast. So in 2015, when SIL LEAD had grown to the point where it needed part-time accounting help, Stacey knew just who to recommend.

About a month into her job with SIL LEAD, she and her husband, along with their two sons who were still at home, made a move to Northern Virginia for new opportunities. The part-time role with SIL LEAD eventually became a full-time job as she took on more and more of the organization’s accounting responsibilities. She is grateful to have been offered the opportunity to grow into her role and is now SIL LEAD’s Controller.

For Valori, it’s been a pleasure to meet all those “word nerds” we mentioned earlier—to hear their stories of sacrifice and commitment, and to see all that’s been accomplished over the years. Valori is a word lover and an aspiring writer herself, so she enjoys being a part of what SIL LEAD does.

“I would probably suffocate if I were just doing a rote job,” she says.

But she adds that her work is very complex and varies widely. SIL LEAD encourages her to find ways to streamline its processes and to do the work as professionally as possible. She is free to think, to grow, and to suggest improvements. She is a valued contributor to the work.

Although like many of us at SIL LEAD, Valori does a lot of her work remotely, she is tied to the organization by her love of language and her commitment to the mission of helping local, community-based organizations use their own languages to improve their quality of life.

Every person comes with a story, and we’re glad that Valori’s story has brought her to SIL LEAD.