We join Toastmasters for varied reasons. One of the common reasons is to become more confident with speaking in public. While our idea of ‘public’ has been reduced to blocks of people on our laptop and phone screens, there are now more opportunities than ever to practise speaking in front of the world.

Pathways enhances our ‘new normal’ with its digital resources and self-paced projects. Navigating the platform may be tricky upfront, but gets more comfortable as you engage with it. My role is to make things easy for members who may be struggling with adjusting to Pathways.

This entails:

• Understanding the key pain points that need to be addressed within the District
• Developing a Pathways onboarding kit which will help new members get started
• Empowering VPEs with supporting documents to distribute to members or to track member progress

The current Pathways adoption rate is 77% which is a great number. However, considering that the legacy program has been phased out, we need to support more members to embrace the program. To this end, a wealth of resources has been collated for members and VPEs which could be accessed on: https://bit.ly/PathwaysSupport74 

This portfolio has been under the radar in this quarter as we are building the team. More will be done to increase visibility and impact. As we continue to do so, you may direct any training or educational needs to pathways@toastmasters74.org so that we can address any gaps that are keeping you from striving for progress.

My name is Luyanda Dlamini and I am the current Chief Pathways Champion.