Albuquerque, NM: Tumbleweeds Toastmasters

Albuquerque, NM
Meets 8 PM First Friday Eastern Time
Attendance: 26

This is the first advanced specialty club that I've visited since I've started my Toastmasters journey across the United States. The club is devoted to support the area directors in the North Division of District 23.

Because this is a specialty club, the format of the meeting significantly differs from that of a regular Toastmasters meeting. In the first half of the meeting, after the pledge and the reading of the Toastmasters district and club mission statements, they welcome guests, describe roles, and have one speech and one evaluation. There are no Table Topics during this meeting so the evaluation happens immediately after the speech. 

In the second half of the meeting, they basically have a division council meeting. The division director leads that portion of the meeting. They discuss upcoming events, issues that need to be addressed, and each of the eight area directors has a chance to report on what's happening in their areas.

Stephen, the North Division Director, was the speaker for the night and he warned all of the current leaders and the incoming leaders at the meeting that's easy to focus on numbers for numbers' sake when serving at the area level or higher. It's OK, he said, for members to support other clubs by belonging to multiple clubs. He termed these people "club ambassadors." However, it does no good, he said to add "paper members" to clubs just to make the numbers look good. 

I certainly agree with that. Paper members give the illusion that a club is strong and then the next year the illusion falls apart and the club is still struggling. I've seen that happen time and time again during my Toastmasters experience.

Members of this club were very welcoming to my wife and me as guests. We even met a fellow peripatetic Toastmaster, Elicia, who is also on a quest to visit all 50 states during this boon of online meetings. That is so exciting. 

If I had to offer one piece of constructive feedback to the club, it would be this. Make sure the timer has some eye-catching way on screen to display the green, yellow, and red timer indicators. In this meeting, the timer held up one, two, and three fingers as the timer indicators and they were difficult to discern. In fact the speaker went three minutes over his allotted time, partly because he couldn't see any timing indicators.

Another observation: The structure of this district (District 23) is different from the structure in District 40. District 23 has 80 clubs and three divisions. I would suggest that this district could better serve its members by adding at least one more division and two would not be a bad idea in my opinion. That would relieve the stress on the current three division directors and provide more leadership opportunities for people at the division level. I acknowledge District 23 may have its reasons for being aligned this way and I'm not aware of those reasons.

If you're not a district officer in District 23, this club would probably not be high on the list of candidate clubs to visit. However, as a Toastmasters fanatic, it was interesting to me to see how a specialty club works. 


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