Our Story

My Neighbor’s Voice (MNV) began in Greenville, SC in November 2016, just after the surprise American election that month. Two friends Victoria Chance and Mary Anne Inglis immediately began discussing what this particular turn of events might mean for their community. They recognized two things: 1) The open hostility in the commons, in the schoolyard, in the home, and in the social media arena was alarming and unusual. 2) The only way to address that hurt, fear, alienation, and outrage was by listening; specifically, by creating an hospitable space for folks to listen to themselves and others think about and share their stories and experiences about serious civic concerns out loud; one uninterrupted voice at a time.

In January of 2017, the first My Neighbor’s Voice dinner event happened. Many things went right and many things went wrong. After that first dinner, the universal listening cards got seriously edited. Chance and Inglis realized they needed a visual timer system. Yet, they and their guests were wonderfully excited about the potential for a shift in future communal dialogue and civic behavior.

For the first three years, My Neighbor’s Voice hosted and sponsored hundreds of gatherings all over South Carolina, and also in Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, California, Massachusetts, and Virginia. During this time, they applied for and received nonprofit status as a 501(c)3 organization in 2018, created a copyrighted box of My Neighbor’s Voice Listening Cards© to sell, and started training facilitators to help facilitatethe increasing numbers of events. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Suddenly, this cozy, welcoming event that involved sharing food and passing cards back and forth among strangers came to a screeching halt. Luckily, they were able to transform the MNV vision and efforts to the Zoom world rather quickly. Now, My Neighbor’s Voice is online and in-person, in cafés, in retirement communities, in churches and spiritual centers, in schools and universities, and is offered as courses and workshops across the country for various corporate groups large and small. In 2023, My Neighbor’s Voice translated the MNV Listening Cards© into Spanish to better engage with more and more of our neighbors.