by Jesse Ford DTM District Director
If you were to ask people (nonmembers) what they think of when they hear the word “Toastmasters” you might be lucky if somebody says, “public speaking.” You would be really lucky if somebody said something about blah blah blah “leadership”. In the end, our organization, despite being around for over 100 years, still struggles with getting the word out. Why? It is simple…It is because we rely on the word of mouth and the “toasty-monial” of members to share and bring guest to meetings. It is hard to sometimes believe that in a world population of almost 8.025 billion people that only 270,000 are currently members of Toastmasters. That is far less than 1% of the world population.
But you know we could use 100% of the 8 billion people. So how do we solve this problem? What can we do about it? Are there any new tools that can help our leaders reach more people faster and better than ever before? Insert our December Outstanding Leader of the month. Congratulations Samantha Watt, the current Public Relations Manager for District 25 on being the December Outstanding Leader of the month. But what did she do to deserve this?
Aside from her amazing job overseeing the Webteam, district newsletters, all our social media and lots of other things, she stepped up to lead a workshop at a Region 3 event all with the one purpose of helping our leaders be the best they can be with the new tool of Artificial Intelligence. Now I promise it is not as scary as it sounds, and she is not going to have a bunch of terminator robots show up if you don’t listen to her, but why would you not want to?
According to Stephen Hawing, “Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.” Thank you again Samantha for all you have and continue to do for the District members but now especially for what you did for the global audience! Here we GROW!