The Story in the Details

When Walt Disney embarked on the making of the first animated feature film in history, everybody said he was nuts. While Disney was the king of short-form animation at the time, everybody knew there was no way animation could hold people’s attention for the full run time of a feature film. They said it would hurt people’s eyes. They called it “Disney’s Folly.” And by the time he was wrapping up production, it sure looked like they had been right.

Walt had been forced to re-mortgage his house to complete it. He’d hired seven hundred and fifty animators and spent almost a million and a half dollars—a fortune in that day and age. One thing was clear: Walt Disney was doomed.

But when Snow White was released in theaters in 1937, audiences were moved to tears and Snow White was a runaway success. In time, it made almost two hundred million dollars at the box office and launched what has become an entertainment juggernaut: Walt Disney Studios. Walt had gambled everything on the power of his story, and he had been right. He’d spent years focusing on the very finest of details: whittling the almost two million images his artists had produced down to the roughly ten percent that appeared in the movie; laboring over every second of the scoring and soundtrack—everything that made his story a powerful, emotional experience for his audiences.

Many years later, a young college student named Michelle got a summer internship at Disney World. Although the bulk of what she did there was “working at a little souvenir shop in Tomorrowland, selling space shuttle souvenirs and Fantasia lamps,” she also attended weekly classes covering the business of Walt Disney—the system that Walt had set in place way back when he was making his first films. Michelle learned about the importance of paying attention to detail. She learned that all the tiny details of the park where she was working added up to making the richest possible experience for the people who came to visit.

While Michelle finished up college, she kept in touch with one of her “Disney roommates,” a young woman from Maryland. This woman had become a Christian, and introduced Michelle to her faith. After graduating, Michelle moved to Maryland and stayed with this friend, soaking up the faith community. There she met the man who would become her husband, and because in Maryland “everything is government,” she found employment as a financial analyst and bookkeeper for defense contracting companies.

When Michelle and her husband began to have children, she turned her focus toward education, homeschooling her four daughters and co-founding a homeschool institute that served over 100 families.

Through all this, Michelle Emelio applied the attention to detail that she had learned at Disney. But another lesson had sunk in during that summer internship, as well: the power of a good story. While Michelle tends to think of herself as “just” a helper, she always looks to be a part of some bigger story—a story that is meaningful and will have an impact.

As her daughters have grown and moved out of their home, Michelle has returned part-time to the accounting work she did earlier in her career. Working for herself allowed time for Michelle and her husband (who is also self-employed) to become involved with disaster relief domestically, and with working with refugees in Greece. It’s a bigger, meaningful story.

When Michelle’s good friend Valori Maresco approached her back in early 2018 about bringing her talents to SIL LEAD, she wasn’t sure at first how much she would be able to take on.

But as her involvement with SIL LEAD has increased, Michelle has come to see that this, too, is an important story for her to be a part of. She has learned what a difference it makes when children are able to learn in the language they best speak and understand. She has seen the impact this can make in the lives of vulnerable children and the children of refugees—the same sort of people she and her husband have worked so hard to serve in Greece.

Michelle’s training and abilities have served her well at SIL LEAD, where complicated government contracts and work all over the globe require the strictest attention to detail. Forms must be carefully filled and finances must be meticulously tracked. Just like her work at Disney, Michelle’s behind-the-scenes efforts at SIL LEAD contribute an essential part of a powerful story that can and does go around the world—bringing delight to children everywhere and, more importantly, allowing them to discover their own, powerful stories.

And as one of our Project Managers notes, “I am grateful even when I finally think I have finished up some paperwork properly and Michelle finds the tiniest of errors. She’s not being unnecessarily picky, she’s helping me and SIL LEAD look good!”