Dear Fellow Toastmaster!

Thank you to all the members and guests who joined us this past Wednesday for a “funky” meeting. We ran our usual meeting until halfway through, where the elections took place for the Spring 2025 executive board.

 🥳🥇 Awards and Celebrations

Don’t be shy, share your life wins and let’s celebrate together!

• We had 4 new guests join us during Wednesday's meeting, including San Mateo Toastmasters’ club president who gave the Golden Gate club high praise

• Congrats to Vipul for winning the best speech and Amanda for being our best evaluator for the night!

• HUGE CONGRATS to the newly elected executive board:

  • President: Alex W

  • VP of Education: Gene

  • VP of Membership: Adam

  • VP of PR: Karishma

  • Treasurer: Scott

  • SAA: Nik and Alexander

  • Secretary: Katie

  • Deputies to Secretary: Albert and Tavisan

 📣 📆 Coming Up

• 12/18 Meeting

  • Please come to our last meeting of the year as we formally introduce the newly elected executive board

 📚️🏫 Toastmastering Together

Let’s get better by learning from each other and sharing resources - also on the footer of every newsletter from now on! If you want to add info or share a Public Speaking Tidbit, let us know!

Some references:

• Golden Gate Toastmaster Resources 

• Toastmaster Meeting Roles One-Pager

🤝 December 11th Club Meeting Highlights

Very short meeting because of elections, but thanks to all who helped!

Thank you to our 4 guests who spent their Wednesday evening with us! 🙏 

Great job to our members who ran today’s meeting: Gene, Shubham, Mike with the Bike, Julia, Sheila, Helen, Nik, Karishma

🙋‍♀️ Help run the Dec 18th meeting by signing up for roles! 🙋

This Wednesday, we:

• 💪 Gene opened up the meeting with his history as a GGTM member, and how much he has enjoyed seeing himself and the club progress forward

• 🏈 Heard Adam discuss his love and hate for college football, and how NIL money has ruined the game

• 👶 Shoutout to Vipul for teaching us how to wipe a baby’s butt in the most efficient and effective way - no origami (🏆 Best Prepared Speech 🏆)

• 🗞 Thank you Katie for reminding us the different between data and evidence and how we cannot always believe what we are reading/seeing in her impactful speech

• 😂 Great job to Tavisan for evaluating Vipul’s speech and using great humor to recap an also humorous speech

• 😁 Heard Amanada’s (🏆 Best Evaluator 🏆) win highlighting Katie’s speech and many great things she did + a few to improve on

  • Thanks to all our evaluators Gene (evaluating Torran) and Grace (evaluating Harris)

New Member Bio: Hanna Aliashkevich

I joined Toastmasters to boost my confidence in public speaking in English and to master the art of storytelling.

My favorite movie is Serendipity—I love watching it during the Christmas season, and it inspires me to dream about ice skating in NY Central Park. Even though I’m a neurosurgeon and scientist, which might sound a little intimidating, I’m actually a very creative and romantic person at heart. I write poetry and have even started presenting translations of my poems at open mic events in the Bay Area!

As for my upcoming speech, I’m still deciding on the topic for my Ice Breaker, but I’m leaning toward sharing my journey of overcoming the fear of uncertainty.

🫵🗣️ Your turn

We would like to hear YOUR stories, information and feedback to make this newsletter, our club and our Toastmastering better. Share it with us!