About Toastmasters
Toastmasters is a non-profit educational organisation. In its many clubs, members learn communication and leadership skills by speaking and working with others in a warm and friendly environment. Started in California in 1924 by Dr. Ralph C. Smedley, who conceived and developed the idea of helping others to speak more effectively, Toastmasters has since grown to be a worldwide organisation.
The power of Ralph Smedley’s vision, through the Toastmasters program, has made a difference in the lives of over four million others around the world.
The Purpose of Toastmasters International
Toastmasters International is the leading movement devoted to making effective oral communication a worldwide reality. Through its member clubs, Toastmasters International helps men and women learn the arts of speaking, listening and thinking; vital skills that promote self-actualisation, enhance leadership potential, foster human understanding, and contribute to the betterment of mankind.
It is basic to this mission that Toastmasters International continually expand its worldwide network of member clubs, thereby offering ever-greater numbers of people the opportunity to benefit from its program.
In order to carry out this mission, Toastmasters International shall:
- Organise, recognise, direct, and guide member clubs as private associations of individuals seeking to improve their speaking, listening, thinking, and leadership skills.
- Utilise its member clubs to provide private educational programs, instructional materials, and practice opportunities for those individuals invited to join its clubs, and to afford evaluation and incentive to personal development through appropriate awards and recognition.
- Engage in research in speech education, leadership training, communications and related fields, cooperate with accredited educational institutions and other organisations in the furtherance of its objectives and publish and disseminate educational materials in, and related to, oral communications.
- Provide communication and leadership programs, Speechcraft courses, leadership training, and instruction in parliamentary procedure, conduct of meetings, group discussion, evaluation methods, and other techniques of communication; and award certificates indicating satisfactory completion of such educational projects as are authorised, supervised, approved, and modified from time to time by its Board of Directors.
- Provide private training at all levels of its organisation to improve people’s ability to listen, think, speak, and lead. For this purpose, Toastmasters International shall establish, encourage, and supervise meetings, conventions, seminars, speech contests and such appropriate activities in the furtherance of its educational objectives as will stimulate interest, participation, and personal improvement of all individual members of its clubs.
- Organise, recognise, aid, and provide instruction for special groups who cannot afford or who are otherwise ineligible for a Toastmasters club charter, whose participants desire training in speech, such as youth groups, groups within correctional and rehabilitational institutions and hospitals, and groups which foster improvements in speech training in recognised educational institutions at all academic levels.
