Minutes from Friday, March 7, 2025
Sunrise Toastmasters
This week’s meeting started with a warm welcome from our Vice President of Education, Toastmaster Abdulrahman Albazie. He reminded us that every great speaker starts somewhere and that being a key point as to why many of us may have joined Toastmasters, then led us into our moment of silence in recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing struggle for racial equality. Abdulrahman concluded with reminders such as use of the bias flag as a tool toward becoming conscientious speakers before turning it over to our Toastmaster of the Day, Toastmaster Anu Parvathaneni. Anu welcomed our guest Christi Lamb and returning guest Matthew Choate, and introduced the word of the day “authentic” meaning real or true, not fake or false. We completed a round of introductions describing authentic moments in our lives from the last week.
Abdulrahman introduced our first speaker, Toastmaster Dave Burr who spoke on the topic of “Citizenship- Blood vs Soil,” a timely topic given the new President of the United States has been speaking of ending birthright citizenship. As a naturalized American citizen and a Venezuelan citizen by birth, Dave described the what, why, and how birthright citizenship came to be. Citizenship is messy and countries “play the game” as they like, which can leave affected individuals in a state of limbo.
Toastmaster Kendra Hiatt introduced our second speaker, Toastmaster Savannah Murphy who skillfully presented a revision of last week’s pocket speech, applying feedback received to enhance it, and spoke on “The Wonder of the Yucatán!” She presented formatted pictures and photographs to compare and contrast the history of the area and how this history has carried through to modern day. Savannah noted that travelers on tours may see the ruins of Chichen Itza, but miss the wonder and tenacity of the Mayan culture.
Table Topics was led by Toastmaster Bettina Ross who actively embraced our word of the day and asked questions centered around authenticity. These ranged from the biggest challenges we face being true to ourselves, the consideration of the authenticity of social media, and what does a life lived authentically look like? We enjoyed some thoughtful moments this morning as we listened to responses to these deep questions.
We then moved onto the Breakfast of Champions, speech and meeting evaluations. Toastmaster Summer Murphy filled the role of General Evaluator, leading us into Speaker 1 evaluation by Abdulrahman and Speaker 2 evaluation by Kendra. Toastmaster Norris Bass filled the role of Grammarian and Toastmaster Tim Murphy kept us honest by serving as Timer.
Food for thought:
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.
I don’t want to go along just to get along.
Being authentic is easy, until things get difficult.
Roles for Friday, March 14, 2025 are as follows:
Toastmaster- Tina Joe
Speaker 1- Norris
Speaker 2- Kendra
Table Topics- Savannah
General Evaluator- Dave
Evaluator 1- Anu
Evaluator 2- Kerstin
Timer- < open >
Grammarian- Abdulrahman
