Former Mariners catcher Dave Valle draws from his mother’s drive to help needy families in DR

Away from the baseball diamond, former Mariners catcher Dave Valle is driven by the inspiration of a mother’s love.

His microfinance outreach organization, Esperanza International, has provided over $65 million to date in over 220,000 loans to the needy in the Dominican Republic. The organization has also provided relief aid in Haiti, contributed to over 220 schools and completed 50 water projects in the DR. The inspiration to do something was provided by an encounter during winter ball in 1985 in Santo Domingo. The inspiration on how to best contribute, though, came from mom.

“I have to go back to the very beginning, where I grew up in New York City,” Valle said. “My mom had eight children, five boys and three girls, and I was number seven in the batters order.”

When Valle was 8 years old, his father passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack. Life changed quickly for the Valle family. His mother Marilyn was left to take care of her family on her own.

“Just watching my mom every day, day in and day out, showing up, getting work done, going to work and working the graveyard shift at the hospital, I just saw this amazing strength, this amazing power of the love of a mother, and what she was willing to do to make sure her children had everything they needed.”

From dinner on the table every night to a new pair of Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers for the Little League season, Marilyn Valle found a way to provide.

“I never really thought about it until I got married and had children of my own,” said Valle. “I still cannot imagine what my mother had to go through raising eight by herself. Because even with three I feel like I don’t have enough time for each one, you feel like you are missing out on so much. So the strength that she had, the emotional strength, the physical strength to work the graveyard shift and still take care of us, still take care of the house? It really truly amazes me.”

Fast forward to 1985 when Valle, early in his big league career, found himself in winter ball in the Dominican Republic getting ready for the season after missing time with an injured knee the previous year. His wife and 4-month old son made the journey with him. One evening in particular was eye-opening.

“We have a bus that comes and picks us up and takes us back to the hotel. The bus is late, all of a sudden the game had ended.  I was holding my little boy Philip, who had fallen asleep. All of these kids came around us. All of them were shoeless, most were shirtless.”

The children weren’t looking for autographs from the ballplayers at the stadium. They were looking for food.

“We were watching these kids digging through the garbage looking for anything that they could eat,” Valle remembered. “There was a woman who was closing up shop, selling some fried chicken and sweet potatoes and my wife, who speaks Spanish, went over and asked her, ‘Can you cook everything you have left? We want to feed the children.'”

The Valles handed out the chicken and sweet potatoes to the crowd and were rewarded with smiles and waves when the bus finally arrived to take them back to the hotel. The scene played out over and over again in their minds on the road back.

“At first it was, ‘Didn’t that feel good?'” said Valle. “But as we started to think through this, Vicky said, ‘You know, in four hours they are going to be hungry again.’ So we just made the commitment that night if we ever have the ability to come back and do something, we would do it.”

That opportunity would come as in 1991. Valle signed a three-year contract with the Mariners, and his wife reminded him of the commitment they had made six years earlier in the DR. They knew they had to do something to help, but what?

“Do we start with a feeding program, but then we came back to that same thought of, ‘Gosh, they are going to be hungry again?,'” said Valle. “It was more of a black hole starting something like that, but then I came across this concept of microfinance where you provide people a loan to start an income-generating business so then they can take care of themselves.”

The idea of microfinance loans took care of the what part. The how, and more specifically who to provide these loans to for maximum benefit to families and children, took Valle back to his childhood home in Queens. The loans should go to moms.

“Initially our focus was the kids, but what we found out was if you help mom, just like my mom, mama knows what to do and how to take care of her babies. So if you help her, she will take care of her family,” Valle said.

Thanks to Esperanza International, many mamas have been able to provide. The organization has provided small loans, usually no more than $2,000, to women to start businesses to help provide for their families. The repayment rate has been 98 percent. Over 200,000 loans distributed and families helped. Numbers you cannot find on the back of a baseball card.

“That night that kind of just sparked, it was a seed that was planted and God opened up our eyes to a need that we had never thought about before,” said Valle. “And we have been very blessed by being able to meet that need.”

Mama would be proud.

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