Our secretary elect, Toastmaster Kerstin Haase, opened the meeting welcoming our International guest who found us on Meetup, leading us deliberately to our minute of silence in acknowledgement and support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Kerstin cleared any doubt on flagging bias, reminding the club how to use our bias flag to support our journey to become better speakers, and transitioned the meeting to the day’s Toastmaster Amelya Evans chose Surge as the word of the day, encouraging use of this word during the meeting.
Amelya welcomed our guest, shared the agenda, and realized unforeseen gaps missing essential attendees. With two speakers confirmed and not present, and a guest, we devoted the speakers allotted time to an extended Table Topics. Amelya consulted with the speaker evaluator and it was decided that is how we would proceed. Great pivot President! And again, another memorable Sunrise Toastmasters meeting began.
Toastmaster Renuka Korlipara was our scheduled Table Topics Master, engaging and challenging Toastmasters and guests in conversation to strengthen our ability to compose thoughts and speak intentionally. Renuka dominated the duration of the speaking portion of our meeting, doing an incredible job extending the session without skipping a beat. Toastmaster’s Kerstin and Amelya both shared additional questions, assuring everyone and our guest had an opportunity to participate. To change it up we accelerated responses of the speakers to a minute, challenging the Timer’s tracking timed responses. This never before situation allowed everyone an opportunity to participate in a meeting devoted to Table Topics, something we’ve talked about, but never attempted until today!
Toastmaster Karen Rhodes served as General Evaluator, summarizing the breakfast of champions portion of our meeting with the thoughtful insights, leading the team in sharing feedback and reports. Toastmaster Norris Bass provided a stellar Timer report and Toastmaster Abdulrahman Albazie proactively timed Norris’s speaking role, teamwork at its finest! Toastmaster Savannah Murphy shared the Grammarian report, helping the Toastmasters to reflect and continue to learn and grow – well done team!
We were amiss reviewing roles for next week, technical challenges prevented our Toastmaster from returning to the meeting. Secretary Kerstin thanked everyone for their participation in another amazing Sunrise Toastmasters meeting before closing the meeting.
The next Sunrise Toastmasters meeting will be at 7 am, April 21 EST on Zoom.
The roles for that meeting are as follows:
TM – Maria
Speaker 1 – Karen
Speaker 2 – Abdulrahman
Table Topics – Angela
Gen. Eval – Greg
Eval 1 – Dave
Eval 2 – Norris
Timer – Luz
Grammarian – Stiles
