Glendale, AZ: Pure Talk Toastmasters

Glendale, AZ
Meets 6 PM Fridays Eastern Daylight Time
Attendance: 6 members and 3 guests

The Pure Talk Toastmasters Club in Glendale, Arizona, is a work-in-progress. From what I saw during my visit to this club, I would encourage other Toastmasters in the area to visit this club and provide support. Toastmasters dashboard shows that the club has been assigned two coaches and they have helped the club increase membership from 7 to 12 members, which is awesome. I wish this club well and encourage them to continue this momentum into the next couple of years.

That being said, there's a lot work to do here. The Zoom session for the meeting didn't start until 9 minutes before the meeting and there were several roles that needed to be filled. One of the roles filled at the last minute was that of Toastmaster of the Day. As a long-time Vice President Education at my own club, I find that inexcusable. I try to have the Toastmaster of the Day role filled for at least the next four weeks at my club. 

Because of this lack of organization before the meeting, the actual meeting didn't get started until after 6:10 PM. I'm a stickler for starting and ending our meetings on time. This lack of planning also hampered the last-minute Toastmaster of the Day because she didn't have a copy of the agenda on hand and that made for awkward transitions during the meeting.
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This was the club's second meeting with online and physical attendance. They still have some kinks to work out there. It might be a good idea to have two laptops at the physical meeting. One could show the lectern and the other could show the audience. Members of the club are not quite comfortable using Zoom yet, but I hope they are becoming more so.

We had one speaker at the meeting: Amin, who was a guest from Toronto, Ontario. He wasn't the planned speaker, but asked if he could speak. The planned speaker for the night graciously stepped aside and allowed him to do so. But then he left the Zoom meeting before receiving his verbal evaluation. That just seemed very rude and inconsiderate to me. It felt like he was just trying to mark off an item on his checklist.

Despite the disappearing act by the guest speaker, Mike went ahead and did a verbal evaluation of Amin's speech. Although it might seem pointless, I'm glad he did that. The important thing to remember is that when we do verbal speech evaluations, everyone at the meeting, not just the speaker, can learn from them. 

One other good thing about this meeting is that we had the opportunity to see Cassandra, who was a member of our club in Kentucky before she moved to Arizona.






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