From the Executive Director
From MNV Executive Director Victoria Chance
Hello, Neighbors, Friends, and Supporters,
Our tagline reads: Listening, Loving, Acting Together. What a joy it is to share the energy and challenges of this particular moment in time with you. Over the past ten years, so many of us have come together to listen, fall in love with friends and strangers with the telling of a story, and then act in large and small ways to make a difference in the momentum of kindness, generosity, and of our shared responsibilities for each other and our world. We have heard and shared the despair, worry, and bafflement of our neighbors, as well as the poignancy, tenderness, and longing for our communities and our nation. Violence, confusion, willful ignorance, and fear slither into our common spaces with a dark and brooding force, and yet…. And yet, over and over again we witness the human heart and mind around an easy MNV story table, and we are renewed in our faith and confidence that together, in time, we will find our way with a brighter and braver light to a more perfect civic union. I am particularly inspired and recommitted to our work and vision by Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas.
As you know, MNV has been crafting Listening Cards with hundreds of universal questions that cover an enormous range of personal, familial, environmental, sacred, and civic topics. It is with unusual and deeply comforting amazement that Pope Leo answers so many, if not all, of our questions in his truly scholarly, thoughtful, and timely work. He repeats the basic requirement that we must generously listen to one another, that we must love one another—no matter whether they look, speak, or worship like us, and we must act together to dismantle our selfish, greed-driven efforts in order to rebuild our broken world for “the common good, the universal destination of goods, for subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice.” And he describes why and how to do that.
Notably, Pope Leo also soberly and seriously addresses our urgent responsibility to act in community with intention and wise counsel to confront the influence and manipulation of Artificial Intelligence by just a few rich and politically powerful people and entities. We must act together to make sure that the remarkable AI tool is accessible to all and does not threaten or diminish human dignity, agency, privacy, or safety. AI cannot compete with the depth, reality, and emotional connection of human intelligence (found in abundance at every MNV event). We probably all need to put our screens down and make more time to be together laughing, crying, celebrating, and lamenting.
Dear Ones, we can act in large and small ways to move toward the light. Vote, grow a garden, create a MNV story table, speak to your neighbors, pray, feed the hungry, serve the stranger, make art, read the Pope’s encyclical, enjoy your life, speak truth, confront falsehood, throw a potluck, be brave, take a walk, adopt a pet, dance, be kind, and be full of your happy self… so that we can change and enrich our world. As part of the MNV community, let’s pledge to empower and invite everyone in our communities to be heard and honored; respected and validated. Let’s be expansive, inclusive, joyful, and undaunted in this moment—Together.
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Thank you for joining us for this special opportunity to hear the voices of the women who started it all, Mary Anne and Victoria.
Want to share YOUR voice? Join us for an upcoming event!