Presidential Thank You Speech (Chennai Toastmasters Club)

Dear Chennai Toastmasters,

I wish you all a very happy & educative new year 2011.

The last 6 months were very adventurous and very colorful. I THANK ALL THE CLUB OFFICERS, VETERAN TOASTMASTERS, AND CLUB MEMBERS, who helped us to elevate Chennai Toastmasters Club to greater heights. 

I take this opportunity to highlight some of the key achievements and milestones that we reached together, during the last term (July - Dec 2010).

Educational (Leader: Rajesh Natarajan)

• No canceled meetings & meeting agenda sent on time.
• Added "Test Your Listening Skills" segment to the meeting 
• 2 DTM Awards - Aditya Maheswaran & Sastharam (Thank you guys)
• Evaluations training workshop conducted by Ravi Baskaran Sir !
• Aditya made the Chennai Toastmasters Club flag fly high, in District 82 conference, by coming out as the 2nd winner in District Evaluations contest

Membership (Leader: Prabakaran R)

• We added 30+ new members to the club
• Club won "Smedleys Award" for adding more folks in a short time
  
• Prabakaran played additional roles as Treasurer & SAA, whenever there is a need (Thank you Praba)

Public Relations (Leader: Vijayaraghavan)

• 4 club newsletters released in 6 months (by involving lots of Chennai Toastmasters Club members)
• 275th meeting celebrated very well -despite Hurricane "Jal" there was a good turnout of members for the celebration
• PRSense e-magazine talked about Toastmasters movement in India/Chennai (We brought the Chief Editor K. Srinivasan as a guest to one of our meetings)

Secretary (Leader: Sadayappan TM)

• Meeting minutes were sent on-time and with lots of good content, since the time Sadayappan took charge
• Sadayappan raised the bar as high as the sky for secretary role - Meeting minutes became more informative, educative and entertaining. Sadayappan added lots of color & creativity to the role. He exceeded the bar set by our previous record setter TM Mani.

Treasurer (Leader: Balaji S)

• Achieved high levels of transparency - for the first time after a very long GAP in the history of Chennai Toastmasters Club  income & expenses data was shared with the club members
• Need to learn the art of delegation from him ;-)

SAA (Leader: Subadra Ashok)

• Kick started the meetings that she attended with a beautiful smile, warm welcome & a colorful introductions
• The club now has a library of all the Advance Project manuals. Subadra took the initiative of collecting all the manuals and creating a library for Chennai TM.
  

The club achieved 9 out of 10 DCP points in less than 6 months. We'll get one more DCP point on Jan 9th, which would make Chennai Toastmasters Club  "eligible" for the prestigious Golden Gavel Award. DCP points are supposed to be achieved in a year and Chennai Toastmasters Club achieved the milestone in just 6 months time.

We had a motto of "Participate, Practice and Perform" when we started our journey, 6 months ago. I'm proud to say that we excelled in all the areas and exceeded all the goals that we had set for ourselves. I wish all the very best to Rajesh & his team, to take the club to the next level. 


- Saro
Immediate Past President,
Chennai Toastmasters,
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