Greetings to Division B Officers and Members,
I am delighted to serve as your Division Director during the 2023-2024 Toastmasters year! As a brief introduction, I have been a Toastmasters since 2016 at Mystic Aquarium Toastmasters Club and completed Competent Communicator (CC) and Competent Leader (CL) manuals. During my Toastmasters journey, I have served as an Area Director for two years, in addition to serving as the President, VPE, VPM and Secretary at Mystic Aquarium Toastmasters club. I have also competed in speech evaluation and table topics contests. I have multiple years of experience in advancing the club performance, mentoring members to achieve their goals, and planning, organization and execution of club and area level speech contests. I believe these experiences helped me to gain the skills to effectively communicate with other leaders and officers in the district to help with their needs and to provide resources in order to achieve high-performance among clubs.
Given that the District’s mission is to build new clubs and support all clubs in achieving excellence, the major objectives in my opinion are to help existing clubs achieve Distinguished status at minimum by meeting their educational and administrative goals, and to facilitate building new clubs if opportunity exists. In order to help existing clubs, I would make sure area directors and club officers are appropriately trained while working to provide support and resources to clubs through area directors. For that purpose, I would meet with area directors on a regular basis to follow the progress of clubs and to address any concerns and issues. I believe that the biggest challenges in achieving the Distinguished club status are the lack of progress in Pathways and inability to retain and/or increase membership numbers, so I would first focus on these areas using the strategies I learned.
I am very much looking forward to working with you this year! Please do not hesitate to reach out to me at divbdir@d53tm.org.
All the best,
Ebru Unal, CC CL
Division B Director 2023-2024