ALE Elite Toastmasters Club’s seeds were first sown in Hong Kong in 2001. As Service Director for ALE in Hong Kong, a colleague of ALE approach me and told me about a non-profit independent organization that might be really great for our ALE members. He invited me to attend my first meeting, which, of course, I cancelled at the last minute because I was too busy.

Thankfully, he persisted, and eventually, I made it to a meeting – a Toastmasters meeting, of course!

After 2 hours, I was hooked! I knew this was the perfect match for our ALE members.

I quickly discovered that Toastmasters allowed for corporate sponsorship and closed clubs. ALE membership was always an exclusive membership club, and the ability to run a club just for ALE members was very attractive to the ALE executives. The best part was (and is) the vast amount of professional quality programs, manuals, projects, and support that Toastmasters International offers. Adding Toastmasters to ALE added a more professional choice to ALE’s huge activity selection.

The first ALE Toastmasters club was established in the spring of 2002 in Hong Kong. In the fall of 2002 I moved back to Taipei to continue to work for ALE in Taiwan. One of my first projects was to begin chartering ALE Toastmasters clubs in Taiwan. The first club was, of course, ALE Elite.

An English speaking Toastmasters club is by its nature dependent on members with a high fluency of English. Therefore, of its approximately 10,000 ALE members in the Taipei metropolis, ALE decided to invite the most active “advanced” English speakers to attend several special “demonstration meetings”. My co-mentor and long-time Toastmaster Tom Ashby and I thought correctly that the most active ALE members would also be the most active ALE Toastmasters club members. Two initial meetings were held which were attended by about 20 ALE members each. Of these initial 40, and some ALE staff for officer support, we easily found 20 new members to form the club.

There are a few things I remember vividly from those early days. First, this group of new members was like the proverbial “young lambs for the slaughter”. None of them had any idea what was Toastmasters and what was expected of them. During the organizational meeting, we decided on a meeting time, a club name and elected officers, and those officers were committing to serve in positions for which they had no idea what their duties, responsibilities and time commitments would be, especially the Charter President Helen Yu and the Charter VPE Gloria Chou. They had ALE support, but it was a brave step for them to take. Looking back, the proof is in the pudding. There were probably no two better charter officers that could have been chosen.

Second, we had to choose a name for the club. I expected that in the future we would have at least one more ALE club in Taipei, either as a split-off the first club as it grew, or as a separate club for more basic and intermediate members. Therefore I recommended against naming the club ALE Taipei. Instead, the ensuing brainstorm among the charter members birthed ALE Elite Toastmasters Club. Analogous names rippled through the new ALE Taiwan Toastmasters clubs as we chartered 4 more clubs over the next year: ALE MAX in Kaohsiung; ALE Ultimate in Taichung; ALE Spectacular in Tainan; and ALE Ladder bilingual in Taipei.

Finally, and a bit sadly, as the charter members become more involved with the club, their time for ALE activities shrank, especially the officers. Most of the members almost completely stopped attending ALE activities. This was disappointing as it was meant to be a companion to ALE activities, not a replacement. On the other hand, the benefit for these members was that they could continue to stay in the club once their ALE membership expired, and thereby continue to improve their English (and communication and leadership skills) in a friendly supportive environment of like-mind familiar adults. This helped the club to grow and prosper and allowed the core ALE members stay together.

I sometimes wonder how it became so successful. How did they learn so much in such a short amount of time? Then at every club meeting I am reminded once again of the dedication, motivation and enthusiasm of the charter members, and those first and second year members who joined not long after, whose spirit lives on in the members and meetings of today.

David Enterline
ALE Elite Toastmasters Club Charter Mentor
Summer 2008