How have you progressed in your Pathways journey(s)?

I have asked myself that question several times this year, as I move deeper into my role as D73 Pathways Coordinator. In this post I will unpack from this journey and share the lessons learned.

We established a team of Pathways Champions who were tasked with providing support for clubs in all Divisions across District 73 – which includes three states of Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria. Our team members are either club executives, Area Directors or Divisions Directors, each with a passion for Pathways. They represent the eight Divisions in our District and incorporate the outgoing and incoming Education and Training Coordinators for each of the 3 states. District 73 contains 155 clubs and has a great track record for Pathways adoption so far.

Support Program

Online Education

D73 Team Pathways has scheduled seven Pathways focussed Online Education Workshops in our D73 Zoom installation, since August 2018. For an overview of what we have accomplished there please access the Online Education page. This page and several others were created this year to provide even more support.

We invited a couple of international Pathways Champions to present and network with us during the year. These included: Lori Haynes D62 and Cajetan Barretto D20. There will be further opportunities to invite Guest Presenters in the next suite of Online Education workshops.

Pathways Orientation

During January 2019 Tracy Green and I began the planning for a Learner Guide to help new users of Pathways, especially those who were having technical challenges. Drafts of the orientation and learner guide pages were scrutinised and edited by the team. The D73 Pathways Orientation site was created as a Google Site – collaboratively designed as an easy to manage and easy to develop suite of resources. A summary of all pages in that site is provided here.

Pathways Training

During the last six months we have fine tuned our training models and resources for sharing across the district. Each Online Education workshop consisted of three 20 minutes segments on topics of interest for members, executives and Base Camp Managers. These were recorded and archived as separate video tutorials, each of which is stored in our D73 Pathways Video Tutorials site.

We developed a suite of Presentation Slides that can be used for individual club training, as well as CLT training workshops delivered during the year. These resources are provided on our Pathways Resources page at the D73 website.Pathways Training Model.

Note: We offer individual Club Pathways @ Your Club Training opportunities and where possible we deliver at club meetings either at their venue or in Zoom.

Sustainable Model

We believe we have a great working model that is both sustainable and portable. The Toastmasters in the team have different skills and talents, different preferences for team communication and most of all, consensus on the collaborative nature of the team’s work. The team is flexible and voluntary in: membership, duration of service, task delegation and leadership. [We tend to work like the traditional ‘flying geese‘ model of leadership, where different leaders step up to take the lead when required.]

Although we don’t do a lot of ‘honking’ we do keep up a regular stream of conversation in our social media tools.

The dynamic model is displayed below with each coloured row indicating the roles, tasks, promotional tools, work flow for online education workshops and a list of portals and channels.

The workflow diagram below showcases our methods of ensuring consistency and reliability of our event creation and scheduling.

The outcomes of this strategy are still evolving and we hope for even more  involvement by other D73 Pathways Champions in the next Toastmasters year.

How do you strategise Pathways Support and organise Pathways Champions in your District?