by Reema Mahamood, DTM, Vice President Membership
In the informal member survey conducted around July and August of last year, several members said they would like to see more variety in our club meetings. Following the success of our Halloween meeting which Robbie wrote about in November, I’m happy to say that we’ve had quite a bit of meeting variety in the last several weeks, some planned and others not so much.
We had our in-person meeting in December which was a nice change from our Zoom setting. I enjoyed meeting a couple of club members I had only known through Zoom, and seeing others after several years since I became active during the COVID work from home mandate in 2020. Trying to conduct a meeting in a restaurant presents challenges, but it is a learning experience for us in terms of adapting to different settings, and projecting our voices to be heard over the noise of other surrounding activity.
Our annual White Elephant Auction was a fun exercise in learning to sell an unwanted item. We had a variety of white elephants such as a bundle of Allen wrench hex keys (I had to look up the name) sweetened with a bottle of wine AND chocolates, jigsaw puzzle sorting trays that came with a timely Christmas puzzle, books (one of which was signed by the author), crystal bowls from previous white elephant auctions, and candles and diffusers. The club netted a profit of almost $100 thanks to generosity of some members who paid more than the winning bid.
Our first meeting of 2022 was a grab bag meeting. There were no assigned roles. Everyone picked a role at the beginning of the meeting, including speaker. It turned out to be a lot of fun; and not surprisingly, the theme was Spontaneity. Bob gave a picturesque speech about his trip to the Netherlands which we all agreed made us want to visit or re-visit as well. It just goes to show that we can do any role, including Speaker, with very little time to prepare.
Last week’s meeting was an “irregular” meeting because we had so few members signed up to attend. But again, we had a successful meeting and Phil’s theme of “Irregular” turned out to be free from clogs of any kind. We also had a guest, Vivian, who participated in Table Topics (and incidentally won Best Table Topics) who commented several times that she enjoyed our friendliness and felt welcome, and having a little extra time allowed each section lead to spend more time explaining the different portions of the meeting as we went along. We are looking forward to seeing Vivian again and having her join the club.
At this Tuesday’s meeting, Phil presented an excellent speech on different ways to conduct Table Topics. Some ideas he shared were to have a variety of items in a bag and have each speaker pick an item unseen; or cards with a photograph on the flip side and the speaker has to come up with a topic related to the photograph. These ideas were triggered from an article in the Toastmaster magazine. These ideas can easily be translated to our Zoom meetings similar to how we conducted the grab bag meeting.
Coming up we will have our Club contests in February, an open house meeting in March, and another in-person meeting for our Anniversary and Awards meeting in May. If you have ideas for meeting variety, please inform Phil and let’s rise to the challenge of adapting to different speaking settings.
