Lisa Marie Valenti Memorial Scholarship
This endowment is established to honor the memory of Lisa Marie Valenti and to assist a deserving EIU Student in their educational pursuits.
Biography of Lisa Marie Valenti
Very few pictures of Lisa exist where she wasn’t naturally smiling. She treated every day like a holiday and tried to do something nice for at least one person each day. Whether it was telling jokes or just making silly faces, she loved to make people laugh. She liked being the center of attention, but not in an overbearing way. She was definitely a people person and loved to talk to friends, family, or whoever wanted to talk with her. She didn’t do all the talking though, as she was a great listener and naturally had a way of making people feel good and at ease when they talked to her.
Lisa learned about working hard from her parents and did so in every job and task she took on, starting with her job working in a bagel shop as a teenager. She picked it up quickly and it wasn’t long before she was suggesting ways to improve things at the shop. She carried that over to a job at Taco Bell that resulted in her becoming a manager, not long after she was hired.
Lisa was very organized, very detailed-oriented, and a perfectionist at everything she did. She had a keen ability to see ways to re-structure things to make them more efficient. The combination of her ability to easily talk to people about virtually anything and her ability to quickly see ways to improve things made her a natural mentor and teacher.
Lisa was also very creative and saw the world through many lenses. Her artistic talent began at a young age and continued through every aspect of her life. She was a natural artist, with an innate ability to combine colors and shapes into art that not only looked amazing but told a wonderful story.
For all these reasons, Lisa chose to get a degree in education while also learning more about art so as to combine the two in her first post-college job as an elementary school teacher. While she never had any children of her own, she would’ve made a wonderful mother, which she demonstrated every day she taught her classes. She displayed great patience and was truly able to relate to children in a way that allowed her to teach them much more than what was written in their textbooks. Lisa moved on from teaching into sales where her love of helping people and conversing with them was a perfect match. When she started her sales job at Cisco Systems, she worked primarily with recent college graduates just getting started in their professional careers. She was a natural mentor to these new professionals, not only in their job duties but in the lessons of life. It was likely by no coincidence that one year, one of these new professionals was actually one of her elementary students. She was so gratified to see that her teaching career had such a positive impact on a young child’s life.
Lisa passed away in November of 2021 at the age of 46 after a hard-fought, 9-month battle with cancer. During her battle, she continued to help and create. She joined support groups and shared how she was able to deal with her treatments with others facing the same ordeal as she was. She used art as an outlet to help her remain strong and calm during her difficult battle. She painted rocks and created a truly amazing picture of a butterfly sending a wonderful message of strength and hope.
After she passed, so many people she touched posted messages describing Lisa and what she meant to them using many different words, but all saying the same thing. Vibrant, beautiful, spiritual, empathic, hilarious, generous, loving, fun, silly, creative, thoughtful, happy, bright, witty, caring, sweet, kind, dedicated, strong, courageous, patient, unique, inviting, funny, sassy, warm, and authentic.
As Lisa continues to help and give back through this scholarship, we hope that if the applicants take just one of those qualities and try to be more of it themselves that they will keep her legacy of love and helping others alive and growing.