Minutes from February 14, 2025
Sunrise Toastmasters
This week’s meeting started of with a warm welcome from our President, Toastmaster Kerstin Welch. Kerstin noted during her opening words that sometimes we need to “put on another pair of glasses” in order to look at something through a different lens. It can be a thoughtful tool to help us see the steps we can take to approach a person or situation differently, and aid our personal growth as well. This led us into our moment of silence in recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing struggle for racial equality. She concluded with reminders such as use of the bias flag as a tool to help us become better speakers as well as welcoming our two guests, Palavi Jakati and Calvin Nomeshie, before turning the meeting over to our Toastmaster of the day, Dave Burr. Dave introduced and encouraged the use of our word of the day, “arrow” and proceeded to lead us through a great meeting adding historical facts about Valentine’s Day and interspersing timely comments regarding meeting format for the benefit of our guests, Palavi and Calvin.
Toastmaster Tim Murphy introduced our first speaker, Toastmaster Summer Murphy whose speech was titled “Yay! I get to speak today!” Summer covered the tools she personally uses to build a presentation quickly centering around selecting the topic, making three or four main points, organizing supportive ideas, and using strong book ends to open and close. She emphasized that developing this skill can lay the ground work for taking advantage of short notice opportunities.
Toastmaster Kendra Hiatt introduced our second speaker Norris Bass whose 5-7 minute speech was titled, “Do You Know?” Norris spoke about a personal event in his life, when his mother suffered a stroke, and the importance of knowing your loved one’s wishes. He also emphasized the need to be an advocate for your loved one as well as taking the help and guidance available to you during difficult times such as this.
Table Topics was led by Kerstin, who thematically incorporated our word of the day into each of her questions. These ranged from who is the tip of the spear for your family to who is the tip of the spear in your work setting, and what color feather(s) would you use on your arrow. We enjoyed some great perspectives from the thoughts generated by everyone’s replies.
We then moved onto the Breakfast of Champions, speech and meeting evaluations. Toastmaster Savannah Murphy filled the role of General Evaluator, immediately leading us into Speaker 1 evaluation by Tim and Speaker 2 evaluation by Kendra. Tim and Summer kept us honest by serving as Timer and Grammarian.
Some take aways from today’s meeting:
- Green means go!
- I’d rather be me than someone else.
- Some arrows are pointier than others.
- Eros was jacked!
Roles for Friday, February 21, 2025 are as follows:
Toastmaster- Abdulrahman
Speaker 1- Kerstin
Speaker 2- Tina Joe
Table Topics- Savannah
General Evaluator- Kendra
Evaluator 1- < OPEN >
Evaluator 2- Summer
Grammarian- Tim
