Announcement – Toastmasters, don’t miss the big show! Toastmaster Savannah Murphy has made it to the next level of competition – woohoo! Division contest winners will advance to the District contests, held at the District 37 conference May 5 and 6. Check out the conference agenda to see the contest times and what other opportunities await for you when you attend the conference. Registrations closed as of 4/30 but don’t lose hope, you can find more information at this link: Learn more about the conference
On to the minutes! Secretary elect, Toastmaster Kerstin Haase, opened the meeting welcoming our faithful attendees and guests 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 us how to use our bias flag to support our journey to become better speakers, and transitioned the meeting to the day’s Toastmaster Stiles Burr. Stiles chose improvise as the word of the day, encouraging use of this word during the meeting. Stiles shared the agenda, and reconciled open roles and another memorable Sunrise Toastmasters meeting began.
Toastmaster Stiles Burr introduced our first speaker, Toastmaster Dave Burr. Dave’s speech was bananas! You guessed it, Dave shared a day trip around the theme of going bananas for baseball. An exclusive event where rules are challenged, all are fed a meal with the price of a ticket, and everyone is welcomed to join in on the fun just by taking a seat! Dave is an excellent presenter, sharing the opportunity to learn by example, we’re grateful for the excellent content and delivery. Well done, Toastmaster!
Toastmaster Kelly Gentry introduced our second speaker, Savannah Murphy. Savannah began a speech we all wanted to hear, unfortunately we were infiltrated with a few bad actors wreaking havoc creating unwanted disruptions. Savannah decided to pause presenting, an extended Table Topics session was decided as our best next step. Nice pivot Toastmaster, another great presenter, we look forward to hearing this speech in it’s entirety one day in the future Savannah!
During Table Topics, John Doggett led an engaging question answer session, challenging Toastmasters and guests in spontaneous conversation to strengthen our ability to compose thoughts and speak intentionally.
We were delighted to have our distinguished guest, Toastmaster Patricio Morat – Area 45 Division E Director, serve as our General Evaluator, summarizing the breakfast of champions portion of our meeting with the thoughtful insights from the speech evaluators, leading the team in sharing feedback and reports. Insightful and thorough speech evaluations were provided by Toastmaster’s Luz Bigelow and Kelly, Toastmaster Abdulrahman Albazie provided a stellar Timer report and Toastmaster Kerstin Haase shared the Grammarian report, collectively helping their fellow Toastmaster’s continuing learning and growth – well done team!
Stiles reviewed roles for next week and the meeting was transitioned to our Secretary to close another wonderful Sunrise Toastmasters meeting. Kerstin thanked everyone for their participation in another amazing Toastmasters meeting before closing the meeting.
For those not familiar with this term, a bad actor is person, group, country, etc. who purposely and usually repeatedly engages in very bad behavior (such as committing crimes or causing harm to others). We took assessment and with a few adjustments regained control of our meeting, seeking the bad actors and removing them from our meeting. Moving forward we are tightening up security, please refer to the updated link to join future Sunrise Toastmaster meetings!
The next Sunrise Toastmasters meeting will be at 7 am, May 5 EST. If you would like to join our meeting as a guest contact us for the Zoom link.
The roles for that meeting are as follows:
TM – Angela
Speaker 1 – Maria
Speaker 2 – (Open)
Table Topics – Stiles
Gen. Eval – Dave
Eval 1 – Greg
Eval 2 – Antwain
Timer – Norris
Grammarian – (Open)
