Spirited Speech Masters is delighted to announce that we successfully achieved President's Distinguished for fiscal year 2019. The requirements for this achievement include:

• On-time payment of membership dues accompanied by the names of eight members (at least three of whom must be renewing members) for one period and on-time submission of one club officer list
• A minimum of four club officers trained during each of the two training periods. (We actually had a clean sweep with all 7 officers having been trained twice!)
• At least eight new members (we had 13!)
• Educational achievements, traditional program:
  • Two Competent Communicators: Joann and Usamah
  • One Advanced Communicator: Dawn, ACB
  • Two Leadership Awards: Sally, ALS and DTM
• Educational achievements, pathways:
  • Two Level 2 completions: Rachel (IP2) and Sally (PM2)
  • One Level 5 completion: Jo (VC5)

Congratulations once again to Joann who placed third at Area speech contest for her speech entitled, "The Clouds are Not the Moon." Dawn, Joann, and Sally all chose to expand their Toastmaster horizons by attending District 56 conference. (We're hoping for an even greater turnout next Spring!)

In terms of special events planning, Spirited Speech Masters hosted Toastmasters CEO Dan Rex in presenting the Toastmasters Corporate Award to Shibu Varghese, the Senior Vice President of People & Business Operations and Chief Human Resources Officer at MD Anderson. We also hosted an Open House event that helped us reach the required number of new and renewing members necessary to achieve President's Distinguished. Thanks to all the members who helped make these two events so engaging and successful!

In terms of our online footprint, we successfully transitioned from our previous web host, FreeToastHost, to private web hosting and a custom domain name. A special thanks to David Carr, author of the RSVPMaker for Toastmasters plugin that made this transition possible.

A special thank you to the outgoing officers, many of whom will continue serving in the same or different capacities this next year:

• Sally: outgoing President, incoming VPE
• Joann: outgoing VPE, incoming President
• Karl: outgoing VPM
• Jonathan: previous VPPR
• Maxine: outgoing Secretary and author of the Weekly Window newsletter that inspired the recurrent blog post by the same name
• Dawn: outgoing and incoming Treasurer
• Naureen: outgoing and incoming Sergeant of Arms

And finally, thanks to all members -- both new and renewing -- for helping to maintain a positive and supportive environment in which we all have the potential for learning and growth!