Mission
   One Voice, an inter-racial community chorus in Richmond, Virginia, performs excellent choral music for the community and provides artistic and educational resources to promote the work of racial reconciliation.
   Through its music, membership and outreach programs, One Voice works toward healing and racial reconciliation between Americans of African and European descent.

                        Vision
   One Voice shall be recognized as a model of the enriching power of choral music to bring together people historically separated by racial tensions.

                     Core Values
  Excellence ~ Diversity ~ Respect ~ Service ~ Hope

Excellence: We challenge ourselves.
   Two factors make excellence the first Core Value that shapes One Voice:
          ·First, excellence attracts good singers and
        good audiences 
      ·Second, excellence exhibits the power and beauty
        possible when people from two races historically   
        separated by racial tension are united in a
        common cause.

   Creating something beautiful through the common experience of singing great music is the cause that unites
us, and the power and beauty we seek is found in the
context of excellence.

Diversity: We need each other.
   One Voice finds strength and unity within our differences as we work to make music together.
   A choir may be viewed as a metaphor for community. 
Like a community, a chorus is a dynamic organism with ever-changing members, relationships, goals and activities.  It is made up of many individuals with unique voices, each contributing to an overarching identity, or sound.  It is the
old idea of “synergy”: the whole is greater than the sum of
its parts. 
   To achieve excellence in choral music - or in a community - distinctly different voices must come together in a common purpose.  Put another way, in order to succeed, we need each other.
   One of the most fundamental tasks of a chorus is to blend many voices into one sound.  Every choir needs strong singers who can lead the section, but a chorus is more than a group of soloists.  Each individual person is critical to shaping the sound of the whole.  Those singers who might not be considered “soloists” bring a gentleness and beauty to the sound that would be difficult to attain without them.  They provide “glue” to the total sound, and without them the “leader” voices would become too prominent, destroying the sense of wholeness that defines and shapes the unique sound of each choir.
   More importantly, each individual brings personality traits that become woven into the fabric of the choir’s sound and total presentation.  The sense of drama that creates a vital experience for the audience is stronger and more effective as each singer is able to invest the emotions emanating from his or her  own “story”. 
   This is the subtle but essential element behind exciting, compelling choral music.  To achieve it requires a communal trust and vulnerability which is possible only as each member understands that to be an excellent choir - or a dynamic community - we need each other.  

Respect: We honor one another.
   One Voice is a “y’all-come” choir.  That means that anyone is welcome without audition.  Achieving excellence as a true community choir is only possible when we treat each other with genuine respect.  If any individual feels unaccepted or unequal, he/she will not be able to fully contribute to the mission.  Respect does not exist in a vacuum, however.  Genuine respect only flows out of genuine love, and love cannot operate in a superficial manner.  Unless love is deeply rooted and shared, it will not nurture respect, and without respect we cannot move forward to accomplish
our mission.

Service: We share in the work of racial reconciliation.
   We understand that the deeply rooted issues that continue to divide us are too large and complex to be solved by singing in a choir, but we do believe that any contribution, however small, is valuable.  Understanding that we can achieve more by working with others than we can alone, One Voice shares its music and education programs with other organizations that pursue racial reconciliation, contributing strength and purpose to their work as we draw strength and purpose from them.

Hope: We persevere with patience.
   Working on anything of importance requires patience and
hope, whether preparing a piece of great music or bringing cultures together.  As One Voice brings people together through choral music, we do so exercising both patience and hope - patience with our inadequacies and imperfections; hope for performances of beauty and power.  Our work is a process that involves moving through various stages of imperfection toward the hope that is in us.