On the 25th of April Monday, Hong Kong Toastmasters Club held our very FIRST hybrid meeting, our FIRST in-person meeting in more than three months, and our FIRST meeting in our brand new venue. It was indeed our first ever FIRST-FRIST-FRIST meeting! Not only were our members extremely thrilled to finally be able to see, hug and say hello to one another face to face (still with masks on), but this was also a great opportunity for us to experience firsthand what works and what may require adjustments in our upcoming hybrid sessions.
Plus, our first Hybrid meeting’s theme was “Inclusiveness”, and our members, friends, and guests both online and in-person all felt “inclusive” in our new, beautiful, and spacious home in V-Co, Causeway Bay.
Ever since we moved all our meetings online at the beginning of January when the 5th wave of the pandemic hit HK, we had been looking forward to this day – to stand on the stage and deliver speeches in front of a live audience again – and we had an awesome evening with four prepared speeches, an online+offline evaluation and table topic session to sharpen our public speaking and listening skills.
Congrats to the following winners of the meeting:
- Best Prepared Speaker: Samuel Wong
- Best Table Topics Speaker: Joyce Pang (guest)
- Best Evaluator (triple tie): Deepti Tiwari, Edwin Lui, and Ruby Sung
We are also grateful to have Joy Pamnani as our general evaluator, her thoughtful insight and feedback are much appreciated.
We believe in what Mother Theresa said, “The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.”
We hope we can inspire others to broaden the definition of family. Instead of drawing a small circle to exclude people, we, HK Toastmasters Club, draw a bigger circle to include everyone like a big family.
