This comes from a Medium article
https://medium.com/@king.tinac/why-im-leaving-toastmasters-f2a9adc2a5e4
In October 2013, she walked into her first Toastmasters meeting feeling both excitement and trepidation. Her goal was clear: she was a singer and wanted to give a recital for her friends, but she was unsure of what to say between the songs. She had heard that Toastmasters could help with public speaking and wondered if the program might assist her.
(As far as she knows, she’s the only person who joined Toastmasters with the end goal of giving a recital to their friends. While people have varied reasons for joining Toastmasters, hers might be considered unusual.)
To make a long story short, the answer was a resounding “Yes!” Toastmasters did help her accomplish her goal. However, in the process, she discovered that there was more to the organization than just learning how to speak in front of a group. She continued even after achieving her goal because she found many benefits to the program, among them:
Networking. She met interesting, disciplined, and friendly people in Toastmasters—the kind of people that one needs both to grow as a person and to have fun. For finding high-quality friends, she hadn’t found a better place to be.
Creativity. Being a Creative at heart, she found that the program, as it existed when she joined, allowed her to explore her creativity. She gave speeches in which she sang, read poetry, and even conducted a drum circle at a club meeting. For a Creative like her, Toastmasters was a laboratory to explore and play with ideas, both old and new.
Feedback. She’ll admit that when she joined Toastmasters, the feedback aspect was her least favorite part. It was scary to give feedback and even more intimidating to receive it. It wasn’t until she joined an advanced club that specialized in critical feedback that she began to understand its value.
After a few years, she realized that being able to give and receive feedback was perhaps the most important skill she had learned. Ironically, she even won the District 55 Speech Evaluation contest in 2021—an achievement that still surprises her when she thinks about how far she’d progressed since her initial fear of giving and receiving feedback in 2013.
There are many more benefits of Toastmasters she could mention, but for brevity’s sake, she’ll suffice it to say that she believes most people could find value in the Toastmasters program if they dedicated themselves to taking advantage of it. She mostly still feels that way, but the program has changed significantly during the past decade, and from her view, not in a good way. That’s why, after a decade of being a Toastmasters enthusiast, she’s leaving the program.
Why She’s Leaving Toastmasters
The first hint that the Toastmasters program was changing came in her District 55 (which is in Texas) in 2017 when “ambassadors” started talking about a new program called Pathways. The goal was to replace the soon-to-be-labeled Legacy program with a new, updated system. It was perhaps the biggest change to the program since women were allowed to join in 1973. There was a lot of hubbub and excitement, but they were already hearing rumblings from other districts that had rolled out Pathways before them: the Pathways program had some serious flaws, and folks who had been around for a while were sticking with the Legacy program for as long as they could.
They were told there was a deadline for those in the Legacy program to achieve the most prestigious award in Toastmasters—the Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM) award. She had already achieved nearly half of her goals toward a DTM, so like many others, she accelerated her work to get her DTM before the deadline. She completed the substantial work and earned her DTM in 2019.
She explored the new Pathways program but didn’t like it at all. She felt constrained in a way she hadn’t under the Legacy program. So much for creativity! Some of the projects felt contrived and irrelevant. And, unlike the Competent Communicator manual (from the Legacy program) that she completed seven times (that’s 70 speeches!), she couldn’t imagine repeating most of the projects from the Pathways program even once, let alone seven times.
As the Toastmasters International (TI) leadership pushed Pathways, she decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. As she began working through Pathways, she found even more serious problems than in the curriculum itself. The educational platform that the Toastmasters administration had chosen didn’t fit the curriculum, and the entire system seemed like it was shoehorned to fit the new program.
She didn’t know any “old timers” who liked Pathways or the platform it was based on. Many of them sent feedback to TI, but, ironically, they didn’t take their feedback. Word on the street was that TI had already decided on their direction, and nothing the “old timers” said was going to change it. They were dinosaurs, and TI didn’t seem to care if they disappeared.
As a software engineer, she couldn’t imagine how TI had chosen such poorly implemented technology. The system requirements seemed simple and straightforward, yet here she was, unable to figure out how to submit a speech completion on the platform. She watched as her club mates spent copious amounts of time figuring out how to perform simple tasks so they could teach newbies how to do them. The frustration was enormous, and she suspects they lost a lot of folks during those years of struggle. But sadly, the worst was yet to come.
In March 2020, the world went crazy, and TI was no exception. Due to panic about COVID, everything went virtual. Her clubs scrambled to learn how to conduct virtual meetings, and though they succeeded, they hated them. Some of them wanted to have in-person meetings despite the warnings about COVID, but TI made a blanket rule that no club—regardless of location or local circumstances—was allowed to have in-person meetings. Many of them felt constrained by the blanket rule, and looking back now, she feels it was TI’s arrogance that led them to believe they knew what was best for every club. Once again, TI had made a decision that was the undoing of many clubs.
Throughout 2020 and the following years, clubs were decimated, and many folded. She visited many of her friends’ clubs during that time to help them out, but the dominoes were already falling. She was a club coach at the time, but the club she was coaching wouldn’t even talk to her about keeping their club open. They folded without even having one discussion about it.
She was a member of three clubs during that time—one of which folded, one is currently on the way to folding, and only the last of the three is healthy in early 2024. Notably, the healthy club defied the Toastmasters rule and met in person as soon as they were able to find a place that would allow them to do so. In general, she noticed that clubs that met in person were faring much better than those that were online.
TI was aware of the ongoing problems within the organization. They had to lay off staff, make adjustments to the program, and cut costs. With the entire program in free fall, TI made the decision in 2023 to raise dues. While the cost of the program was never egregious, the 33% rise came at a time when most people (at least in the U.S.) were already tightening their purse strings. While many members were limping along at the old dues rate, the announcement of increased dues made them suddenly re-evaluate their membership. For those in multiple clubs, the news forced them to assess the value of paying dues to multiple clubs.
The Final Nail in the Coffin
The decision to raise dues 33% became the final nail in the coffin for her and many of her “old timer” friends. It was, in fact, the thing that accelerated the demise of one of her clubs. Between Pathways and virtual meetings, members didn’t feel they were getting enough value even at $45. The idea of paying $60 (every six months and per club) for a failing system made the decision to leave easy for some of them. There wasn’t much left of the program they once knew, and after dealing with their grief about leaving the program they once loved, it was finally time to say goodbye.
Some would argue that Toastmasters is still a good value, and she’d agree that, for the most part, it is. New members entering the program can and probably do find much value in it. What’s missing—and will likely be a problem for a while—are the experienced members who know the ins and outs of the program and were willing to teach new members. If her District is any indication, the foundation of experienced Toastmasters speakers and leaders is crumbling. That doesn’t mean the program isn’t useful, but newbies can expect to have much less support than they would have had five years ago.
Goodbye
Will she miss Toastmasters? Of course. But a friend of hers said it best when she lamented, “I miss the pre-COVID Toastmasters.” Perhaps they could have survived Pathways. Some of them successfully ignored the Pathways program and gave the speeches they wanted to give, anyway. But none of the old timers signed up at Toastmasters to learn how to speak to a red dot, and as their friends left the program, it seemed more and more inevitable that many more of them would leave as well.
Toastmasters used to be about community—the community that helped them grow, make new friends, and explore creative topics. But to her, they’ve lost a significant portion of that community because of TI’s hubris.
While the problems TI has experienced are not entirely of their own making, in her perception, the root cause of their demise has been incredibly ironic: Toastmasters International failed to take its own members’ feedback.
Will the Toastmasters program survive? She and her friends have mixed opinions
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