The District 91 Conference was hosted in Southampton this year. Named the Mayflower conference, it brought together Toastmasters from across the country to “discover new worlds”. We had the pleasure of of being inspired by Mark Brown, the 1995 World Champion of Public Speaking, since winning he has delivered more than 3,500 presentations, to more than 1.7 million people on 5 continents. We also heard from Mike Storkey, the Toastmasters International President who had travelled over from Australia to visit the conference; and we also had a series of workshops on a diverse set of leadership topics including: Gravitas, Mentoring and Debating.
Of course, the main events were the International Speech Contest and Evaluation Contest, with Tom O’Toole representing City of London Toastmasters as a finalist in the Evaluation contest. Both competitions were were incredible in terms of standard, everyone did very well.
The final results are:
International Speech Contest
- 1st Simon Bucknall
- 2nd Ola Aralepo
- 3rd Sonia Aste
Speech Evaluation Contest
- 1st Tazud Miah
- 2nd Bob Nisbet
- 3rd Charlotte Hitchings
Massive congratulations to Simon and Taz. Simon will now be preparing for his international semi-final and possibly final in Vancouver, Canada. All the best to him.
