by Jamie Reeg, Club Secretary, Alliance Networks Toastmasters
Since the onset of the changes in the world, we have experienced many new things, the biggest one in Toastmasters being virtual meetings. Aside from figuring out how to best conduct a meeting on Zoom instead of in person, we have been able to have guests from around the country. While some of them are our own members who have found a way to travel and still join our meetings, the other guests are from a club that is over 600 miles away from ours.
In April of this year, our club here in Fort Worth, TX was contacted by Jessica from the Rail Talkers Club in Omaha, NE. Their club meets on the same day and time as our Alliance Networks Club meets. We have held joint meetings once a month taking turns on which club conducts the meetings and sharing speakers and evaluators across the clubs for each meeting.
This experience has been one of a kind. We have gotten to see how another club runs its meetings. Although the general structure is the same, each club has little touches that are different between the two. Also, having fresh ears from another club for evaluations has brought to the table more insight into how we are as speakers.
While things have changed, they have not all changed for the negative. If it were not for these interesting circumstances that surround us, we probably would not have ever joined up with this group as we have.
