ToastMasters International

ToatMasters was first formed in 1924 in the USA and initially it was for men only! Last Saturday was its 87th birthday. Women were only allowed to join in 1973 but there are now similar numbers of men and women in the organization. There are now 270,000 members in 13,000 clubs around the world although the largest number of clubs are in North America. As you would expect TI has a website, is on Facebook, Linked In, Twitter and YouTube. And if you just google ToastMasters in Google you will get over 7 million hits. Every year TI holds an International Conference where one of the main events is the competition where the World Champion of Public Speaking is chosen. The ToastMasters who have won this award typically go on to become very successful public speakers who are much in demand at ToastMaster Conferences and for other speaking engagements. And it all starts by winning your club's International Speech contest in the spring!

District 60

Uptown ToastMasters club belongs to District 60, one of the 87 districts in ToastMasters. This district now covers all of Toronto and South Eastern Ontario as far as Prince Edward County. Until 2008 it also covered South Western Ontario, Central and Northern Ontario but that part of Ontario now belongs to  District 86. An extensive history of District 60 can be found on its website. The website is a good source of information about who's who in the district, contests, officer training, upcoming events in the district etc. The district holds 2 conferences every year in spring and fall. The fall conference in November will include the District Table Topics and Humorous Speech contests, workshops, business meeting and the opportunity to meet with ToastMasters from across the district.

All about the Club

Uptown is an Open Club which means anyone can join but most of its members work at Canadian Tire. Our members are all ages and come from many different countries.  We meet at lunchtimes for an hour every week. Other clubs meet at breakfast and most community clubs meet in the evening and can meet for longer than an hour. The club has been in existence for over eight years and can now be considered a mature and successful club. What do I mean by mature and successful? We have several members who are going for advanced communicator awards. We hold contests every year. We have won Distinguished Club awards for the last four years. Could we be better? Of course - there is no such thing as a perfect club anymore than there is a perfect person.  We do have a website which was started a couple of years ago. We had planned to develop a members only part of the website but this is still under construction.
What do you want to know about the club?   Now is your chance to ask.

The first post

Oct 13 - I am creating this blog as part of my final technical presentation for my Advanced Communicator Silver award. I have been putting this speech off for months but it is time to stop procrastinating and just do it!  The objective of this much delayed speech is to make use of the Internet and I thought I should use it to provide an overview of ToastMasters. I am planning on making this an interactive presentation by finding out what the members of Uptown ToastMasters would like to learn about ToastMasters. Normally when you hear a speech from a member of the club all you know about the speech beforehand is the title. I want to make this speech different. I want to hear from everyone in the club what they think should be included in my speech. Uptown is a lunchtime club so we only have an hour for our meetings which makes it difficult to provide time for just chatting to each other and learning more about ToastMasters.
As one of the frequent recommendations for a speech is to include three key points I will make a start by outlining my three key points. This speech will  provide  information about the club, our ToastMaster district (60) and TM International.
Now I have started and the next hurdle is to make sure my first post is not my final post!