Our President, Kelsey Long, opened this week’s meeting. After leading us into our usual minute of silence in acknowledgment and support of the Black Lives Matter movement Kelsey turned the meeting over to this week’s Toastmaster, John Doggett.
John chose “gratitude” as his word of the day, in a nod to the Thanksgiving season, and shared some of the things for which he has gratitude. We had twelve people in attendance, including ten members and two guests, Greg Sutton, and former member, Joe Stack. After introductions, John turned the meeting over to our first speaker of the day, Kerstin Haase.
Kerstin presented a Level 1 project from the Dynamic Leadership pathway. Kerstin’s assignment was to incorporate feedback she received from her last speech in presenting an encore version of her talk titled “A Servant’s Heart, Becoming Lions.” Kerstin used notes from her previous evaluator, Anu, to make improvements to her first speech by sharing more of the story of what exactly Lions Club members actually do to serve and how she and her husband got involved with that organization. Anu Parvathaneni was again Kerstin’s evaluator, and commended her for building the speech up using the feedback she had received during her first presentation.
Our second speaker, Dave Burr, gave a Level 4 elective presentation from the Motivational Strategies pathway which challenged him to create a new social media concept. In the week prior to his speech, Dave invited the group to try their hand at answering American history and civics questions found on the U.S. citizenship exam, involving everyone in his subject matter and skillfully illustrating the lack of understanding US citizens often have about our own government. In his speech, “The Inconvenient Patriot,” Dave laid out a plan to create a Twitter account that questions Americans’ understanding of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution by using specific details from history that don’t support the common narrative. His evaluator, Kelsey Long, applauded Dave’s presentation for laying out the importance of facts as the underpinnings of public policy in “credible and unequivocal terms.”
Angela Marsh stepped in this week as Table Topics Master, and centered most of her questions around Transgender Awareness Week. Sharing data from the largest US transgender survey of about 28,000 people and also providing a quote about belonging, Angela used the data and quote as a springboard for questions that were related but were more cis-gender in nature.
Amelya Black served as the General Evaluator, and gave a thorough review of the meeting. Nereida Sutton was the Timer this week, and reported on times for the prepared speeches, Table Topics responses and speech evaluations, and Karen Rhodes served as Grammarian.
Please note that we will not meet on December 24 or December 31. Sunrise Toastmasters will host an Open House meeting on January 7. Please invite friends and family and former members and guests to join us on Zoom on that date during our regular meeting time. The Open House will have one prepared speech and an extended Table Topics session to give as many people as possible a chance to speak.
The next Sunrise Toastmasters meeting will be at 7 am December 3 EST on Zoom.
The roles for that meeting are as follows:
Toastmaster: Norris
Speakers: (1) Karen, (2) Tim
Table Topics: Dave
Gen. Evaluator: Savannah
Evaluators: (1) Summer, (2) John
Timer: Kelsey
Grammarian: Open
It is a regular occurrence at our weekly Sunrise Toastmasters meetings that our members express their gratitude for this group and the way we all support and encourage each other to make ourselves better communicators, better leaders, and better humans. Join us for a meeting and see why!
A note from the Secretary: I missed the November 19 meeting to attend my daughter’s wedding and wish to extend tremendous thanks to members who sent me information about the meeting to use in this week’s Fast Forward/Rewind.
