Indianapolis, IN: Associated Speechmasters

Indianapolis, IN
Meets noon Eastern Time Fridays
Attendance: 6 members and 3 guests

Many clubs shy away from hot-button topics, but not Associated Speechmasters on the day I visited their club. The theme of the meeting was Black Lives Matter, which is certainly polarizing our society today. Since everyone at this meeting fell on the same side of the issue, there were no fireworks at the meeting. It would have been interesting to have heard a differing viewpoints on the topic and watch people discuss those in a civil fashion. Civility!!! That's what is missing in many of the conversations about the issues of the day.

This is a small club of 12 members and it appears that they've had some membership churn over the last 12 months. They've added eight new members in that time, so they might have some issues retaining members. With so few members, some people have to double up on meeting roles. For example, the Toastmaster of the Day, Stefanee, also did Table Topics duty. 

There was only one speaker and the evaluator for that speaker focused more on content instead of mechanics, which is the opposite of how it should be, in my opinion. I know this a noon meeting, but I'm a firm believer in having the Zoom meeting room open at least 15 minutes before the start of the meeting. I was able to get into the meeting five minutes before it started.

One thing this club does differently than my home club is that it has evaluators for Table Topics responses. I've seen this at a few other clubs. However, how they assign the evaluators for the Table Topics responses was a bit befuddling for me. Evaluator #1 evaluates the prepared speech and Table Topic response #3. Evaluator #2 evaluates responses #1 and #4 and Evaluator #3 evaluates responses #2 and #5. Confused yet? I was. The bad part about it is that my wife Cynthia and I were asked to be Evaluators #2 and #3. As a guest, that seemed unnecessarily hard to follow for me. 

One last thing: At the end of the meeting, it was mentioned that the club still hasn't elected a President for the new Toastmasters year which started July 1. It appears that last year's President will continue on in that role. That's not a good indicator about the health of the club and its leadership. I wish them well in this upcoming year.








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