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Happy new Year everyone!

2022 was a good year for Liverpool Speakers Club. We were faced with several challenges at the start of the year. It was our fist full year of being able to meet up after the pandemic. We have changed our regular meeting day from a Monday to a Wednesday, and it took some time for us to re-adjust as that wasn’t suitable for all members.

However, we’ve managed to regroup, pick up some new members who have been excellent additions to the club, and we feel that we’ve got some momentum going into the new year which we are very eager to build upon. We have also altered our membership fee structure, which we believe is far more suitable than our old way to face down the cost of living crisis.

We were also active in the wider speakers club community. We welcomed some members from Stockport Ladybrook and Manchester Peterloo to our meetings in 2022 as well as Area President Claire Tunnicliffe and District President Ann Bouget. We were delighted to be able to return the favour with David, our education director, acting as a judge in Stockport Ladybrook’s evaluation contest. Our members also fared well in area and district competitions this year.

Now that we feel as though we have adjusted to a new meeting day, we have some big plans for 2023. We want to focus on constantly changing up the format of the meetings, re-emphasise education and development of our members, not just in terms of speaking but we can teach critical evaluation and how to chair meetings.

We also want to develop the social side of the club to make it feel like a community.

In short, we have a lot of ideas for this year, so watch this space! We would love for you to be a part of it, so please feel free to come along to one of our meetings any time.

Well, 2021 was only marginally better than 2020 wasn’t it?

Once again, we spent the bulk of our year confined to virtual meetings.

However, in November we were able to hold our first in-person meeting in 18 months, and again in December we were back in-person.

The online meetings certainly served a purpose, and allowed the club to keep going and for us all to keep in touch and keep our skills up, but it’s so much better being back to seeing each other in person!

Hopefully, we’ll be able to keep this up throughout 2022.

2022 is a momentous year for the club. We’ll be celebrating our Diamond Jubilee this year as it is our 60th anniversary of our foundation. We’re hoping to mark that with a celebratory dinner and we’ll be looking to come up with some special events. Watch this space!

In the meantime, our first meeting of the year is on Wednesday 12th January. This is because our venue isn’t open yet on Mondays, but the plan is to revert back to Monday once this happens. So, if public speaking was one of your New Year’s Resolutions, then please come along and see how we can help!

Finally, there are reasons to be optimistic!

The evenings are getting lighter, the temperature is getting warmer and we can finally see a way out of the troubled year we’ve had.

The club has kept going through the past year. Although we’ve not met in person since March 2020, we’ve managed to keep virtual meetings going throughout. It looks like we’ll have to continue meeting that way for now, but hopefully we’ll be able to met in person sometime later this year. We are still meeting on the second Monday of the month, and all meetings are being done via Zoom. Guests are still welcome to attend, so please contact us via email or through our socials and we’ll give you the link so you can jin us and get a taste of what the club is about and how we can help you meet your public speaking goals!

We may have shortened this meeting so that everyone got home before storm Ciara got too bad, but that didn’t stop our members from coming along and making February’s meeting a big success.

Maggie gave a great speech about the importance of sleep, then David bravely gave an impromptu speech about why it’s too soon to worry about Coronavirus!

Following a break, Satya chaired a great topics session where we covered topics such as ‘do we make our own luck?’, ‘what is a fair exchange’ and Adrian told us all about golddust!

We were also delighted to welcome Ruth to the club as a new member!

Our next meeting is on March 9th and we’ll be practicing another form of speaking by having some mini-debates!

Our September meeting was a bit different than normal, as we held our annual speech contest.

Our club is part of the ASC, a national organisation. Every year, the ASC crowns a national champion in each of the three main disciplines of public speaking, prepared speeches, impromptu speaking (known as ‘topics’) and evaluation.

So, we wanted to crown a champion that we will send to represent the club at our local area competition. There were contestants in the speech contest spoke about diverse subjects such as tap dancing, abolishing copper coins and a completely new and original speech about fast food!

The club is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2019 Liverpool Speakers Club prepared speech contest, with a fantastic speech about the high street, is Satya Morarji! Well done Satya!

Our next meeting will be on October 14th. Guests are always welcome, so if you’ve ever wanted to try public speaking, then please come along!

Liverpool Speakers Club got our year off to a great start, with an action-packed meeting to start the year.

Our prepared speeches were from a mix of new and experienced members, with Pam getting us off to a start with a speech on that little-talked about subject known as Brexit, then we were followed by Nick, who gave his first speech and then club President John gave a fun speech about New Year’s resolutions.

David then took the chair for the topics session where our members and, encouragingly, our guests, spoke on a wide range of topics where they shared things like their goals for 2019, and their cooking prowess!

Our next meeting is on February 11th, and all are welcome to come along!