by Colin Dennis

Created on: September 15, 2009

As the Educational Director for the local Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), Ralph C. Smedley found that many young men were unable to express themselves clearly or fluently. To help them improve their speaking skills, Smedley started a club where they could work on those skills. It may have been a successful idea, but the clubs Smedley started ultimately floundered following each of the four times he was transferred by the YMCA.

The idea only stuck after he was transferred to Santa Ana, California, where his concept of a self-sustaining club geared towards the practice and improvement in public speaking, finally took root. He founded his first Toastmasters club on October 22, 1924 in Santa Ana.

"The unprepared speaker has a right to be prepared," Smedley once said. It was with this in mind that he founded Toastmasters as "a non-profit, non-commercial movement, for the benefit of its members." Smedley continued working for the YMCA as Secretary until he was 63, leaving to focus more attention on Toastmasters International with which he remained until just before his death at 87 in 1965.

Smedley wrote The Great Peacemaker, a biography of Henry M. Robert, author of Robert's Rules of Order, which plays a major role in Toastmasters activities. He also produced "A Manual of Instructions" and "Ten Lessons in Public Speaking," which were mimeographed with paper covers, copyrighted and used throughout the Toastmasters organization.

Today, Toastmasters is an international organization with more than 235,000 members in more than 12,000 clubs in 108 countries. There are Toastmasters clubs in business and government organizations. There are more than 5000 corporate clubs including well-known ones like Royal Bank, Pepsico, FedexKinkos and PriceWaterhouse Coopers. Government-based clubs include those at the Pentagon, Australian Taxation, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, NASA, Food and Drug Administration, UNICEF, and Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), Ministere de Revenu de Quebec. These clubs -corporate and government- have "closed" memberships, meaning that only employees can become members.

Many organizations like Canada's CRA incorporate Toastmasters training into their workplace education and development programs to help their employees improve their communication and leadership skills. The CRA, for example, provides paid time off, usually about thirty minutes, for Toastmasters meetings held on their premises. Toastmasters fits into the CRA's competency-based

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