History of VoiceFlame

Informally founded in 2004 by CEO Mary Tuchscherer, VoiceFlame began by offering writing workshops and classes to women in the San Francisco Bay Area.  By 2006, she was offering her teaching and leadership services on a national level, and in 2007, she expanded her focus to Malawi, Africa. Once Mary learned that there were less than a handful of books published by women in this impoverished country, it was an easy choice to expand the work to the “Warm Heart of Africa.”

In 2009, Sue McCollum joined VoiceFlame as COO and began offering workshops in the Washington, D.C., area and co-leading with Mary in Malawi. In 2012, Susen Hickman became the CFO of VoiceFlame. In the same year, VoiceFlame incorporated and achieved non-profit status.  It was at this time that VoiceFlame published its first book, an anthology featuring essays written by women in Malawi and the United States.  This book grew out of the organization’s efforts to encourage women’s voices in Malawi and connect women across the globe through writing. We hope this will be the first of many such publications of Malawian women’s work.

VoiceFlame has reached over 1,000 women and girls in Malawi. By 2016, our aim is to connect, educate and empower over 4,000 women and girls directly and up to 40,000 indirectly. We will accomplish this by linking people in one of the poorest countries in the world with people in one of the wealthiest, and implementing our six key high-impact, low-cost programs through writing workshops, writing facilitator training, anthologies of Malawian women’s writings, educational scholarships, cross-cultural learning journeys and creative communication projects.