Minutes from Friday, October 31, 2025
Sunrise Toastmasters
This week’s meeting started with a warm welcome from Toastmaster Kendra Hiatt, who started the meeting with our weekly One World Many Voices opener. She mentioned the World Central Kitchen and the extraordinary work it does to provide sustenance to people in dire situations, from destruction due to hurricanes to war torn countries. Kendra also noted that while these events are catastrophic, the daily struggle for food is a norm for many people and disproportionately affect people of color. This led us into our moment of silence in recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing struggle for racial equality. The introduction was concluded with reminders such as use of the bias flag as a tool toward becoming more conscientious speakers.
The meeting was then turned over to our Toastmaster of the Day, Toastmaster Savvy Murphy who started us out reminding us of Halloween and solicited a volunteer for the somewhat ‘scary’ role of a true Pocket Speech. A pocket speech is an unprepared, last minute fill in and is an additional means to strengthen our public speaking skills. She then introduced the word of the day, ‘vigil’ which is to be awake when normally you would be asleep.
Toastmaster Summer Murphy introduced our first speaker Toastmaster Gulnara Askerova, giving her ice breaker speech “From Chemistry to Coaching.” Gulnara shared how life experiences shaped her having grown up in the Soviet Union at the time of it’s collapse and living through the economic collapse of that time. Her family sold everything they could, even special and loved items like a hope chest. Through all of this, they kept going to dance lessons and Gulnara developed a love of ballroom dancing and after emigrating to the U.S. she became a ballroom dance instructor for 14 years. Upon self recognition of reaching her limits in terms of growth, new life goals, and her personal health transformation, shetransitioned again to being a Health and Life Coach. She focuses on women over 40 yrs to help them maintain health and energy, concluding by stating she now finds herself with Sunrise Toastmasters to help her become a better coach for her clients. Congratulations Gulnara, on an excellent ice breaker!
Toastmaster Norris Bass introduced our second speaker, Toastmaster Tom Asimos who stepped into the role of second speaker, presenting the pocket speech entitled “No One is Awake.” Tomorrow reminded us of a great woman in American History, Susan B. Anthony, who worked tirelessly for women to be given the right to vote and for the end of slavery. While she herself never had the right to vote, this was achieved in 1920 in large part due to her tireless work. She did see the end of slavery during her lifetime, but by the time of her death in 1906 the emergence of Jim Crow Laws had started and the restriction of voting to whites only. Tom commented that while Susan certainly had much to be proud of in terms of her lifetime achievements and where we are today, relative to her own time, he is not sure that would be the case given recent events with the current administration. Thank you Tom for stepping up and sharing this great speech.
Table Topics was led by Toastmaster Tim Murphy and focused on Halloween and other similar global traditions. Questions included: what is the best costume you have worn? Would you spend the night in a haunted house? Do you prefer trick-or-treating, scary movies, or costume parties? Have you ever had experience that made you believe in ghosts? We were able to hear from Toastmasters Dave Burr, Abigayle Barnett, Abdullahi Hussein, Melissa Dutmers, Stiles Burr, and Yuko Honda.
We then moved onto the Breakfast of Champions, speech and meeting evaluations. Stiles served as our General Evaluator, turning it over to Summer to complete Speaker 1 evaluation and then to Norris to complete Speaker 2 evaluation. Yuko Honda and Summer filled the Timer and Grammarian roles.
Food for thought:
I need to do something as brave as a pocket speech.
Our goals are to be on fire, but no one is awake.
Running on coffee and life experiences.
Every big chapter started as a challenge, and became a turning point.
Roles for Friday, Nov 7, 2025 are as follows:
Opening: Matthew Choate
Toastmaster: Kerstin Haase
Speaker 1: Sophie Wu
Speaker 2: Md Adnan
Table Topics: Tina Joe
Gen Evaluator: Chang Yu
Evaluator 1: Summer Murphy
Evaluator 2: Norris Bass
Timer: Tim Murphy
Grammarian: Abdullahi Hussein
