Toastmasters International -

The 2024 World Championship of Public Speaking® capped off Toastmasters’ 100th anniversary celebration in August with some memory-making milestones of its own.

For the second consecutive year, and the third time in the organization’s history, three women earned all three of the WCPS trophies. They were among eight contestants in the final round of the contest, which begins at the club level with 30,000 speakers vying to advance to the international stage (semifinals and finals) at convention. This year, all competitors attended the Anaheim, California, event in person.

Luisa Montalvo, a Texas retiree (District 55), won first place with her speech “37 Strangers,” a riveting tale of a near-death experience. She is the first Hispanic to win the competition; she placed second overall in the 2019 contest.

Hannah Cheng, from Taiwan (District 67), won second place with “Are You Ready?” a humorous and forthright tale about forging past self-doubts. Californian Angeli Raven Fitch (District 4) placed third with “Replaced by Sophia,” an uplifting lesson about the human voice in a world beset by artificial intelligence.

Here’s a look at the three winners, whose performances captivated their fellow Toastmasters around the world.

Luisa Montalvo

Luisa Montalvo speaks with relatively few words—and the ones she chooses are usually punchy, poignant, and powerful, delivered in her distinctive voice. She agrees with someone who once told her, “You don’t talk like everyone else.”

“I don’t know how to speak any other way,” Montalvo says of her speech style, which blends an understated, conversational tone with personal life lessons, humor, and subtle yet impactful props. She loves to speak and compete—a passion that earned her the 2024 title.

Montalvo found her affinity for the stage as a 12-year-old, accompanying her mother when she spoke to large meetings of sales representatives for the Avon cosmetics company. Young Luisa began to share product testimonials with audiences and came to think nothing of speaking to a group of 200 people.

“I just thought everyone did that,” Montalvo laughs. “I thought it was normal.” As a result, she’s never feared public speaking.

When she discovered Toastmasters in the 1990s, as a member of a corporate club, it provided the perfect setting to hone her skills. That club disbanded but Montalvo re-connected with Toastmasters 11 years ago, when she went to the library looking for interesting activities to pursue in retirement and saw a sign inviting people to a Toastmasters meeting, and so she went.

Montalvo’s winning speech, “37 Strangers,” drew on her near-death experience in a car accident two years ago that left her in a wheelchair, with limited mobility. She opened her speech forcefully with a single word—“Clear!”—the unmistakable command medical professionals give when preparing to use the defibrillation paddles on an unresponsive patient—which Montalvo was for six minutes. (“Best sleep ever!” she told the audience.) The 37 emergency and medical workers who came to the accident site saved her life, Montalvo said.

“They didn’t know anything about me—only that they cared and were there to save me. If 37 people can come together and put all this energy into me, can you imagine what all of us could accomplish together? All it takes is treating each other with dignity and worth,” she said.

But she couldn’t resist a funny comment about the number 37. After the accident “I received 37 invoices from 37 different places,” she laughed.

Montalvo notes that she always writes from her life in her speeches. She regularly writes down or records memorable experiences or thoughts and uses those to shape stories. The first result is usually a 15-minute piece that she gradually whittles down with relentless editing. Every word, gesture, or prop must be essential.

Since Montalvo almost always slips humor into her speeches, she paces herself to allow two minutes for audience laughter. Their response forms a bell curve, she notes. “You have to wait for the audience response to fall off before you continue.”

Her props often speak as loud as her words. In the 2024 semifinals, she used drumsticks to demonstrate the drama of time ticking away, and in the finals, got everyone’s attention with defibrillator paddles.

Props can amplify the message, sights, and sound of a speech when used with purpose, she says.

“The smaller the props are, the better, as long as they’re not drawing attention away from the story.” In 2019, her props included a tire iron, rosary, and beanie in a story about racism.

In this episode of The Toastmasters Podcast, the hosts speak with 2024 World Champion of Public Speaking Luisa Montalvo about her triumph at this year's International Convention in Anaheim, California.

Recent tough times, including the death of her mother, as well as recovering from her accident, have made Montalvo more sensitive than ever to life and compassion. A major plan for another of her passions—rescuing unwanted dogs—is next up on her bucket list. It’s what she was doing when the accident occurred, and she is in the process of establishing a free canine spay and neuter clinic in South Texas.

However, for now, the thrill of winning the WCPS has motivated her to yet another goal. “You don’t know what [winning] means to me. I’ll be back next year and I’ll be walking!”

Hannah Cheng

Hannah Cheng, a legal counsel and member of Chungli Toastmasters Club in Taiwan, asked a universal question in her speech, “Are You Ready?”

It was a question she had asked herself many times when faced with choices and opportunities. As a young woman, she wanted to move from her native Hong Kong to live abroad but her self-doubts and others’ opinions kept her stalled—until a former boss convinced her that simply starting on something you want to do is the decision that matters most. Cheng took his advice and moved to Taiwan.

With the encouragement of a former Toastmasters Club President she met at a café—a side story that drew a huge laugh from the audience—Cheng joined Toastmasters nearly two years ago. Self-doubt followed her.

“When I first joined the club, I made a list of my life events and stories,” she says. “And ‘fear to start’ was the topic I felt most emotional about.”

Her internal voices repeatedly told her she wasn’t ready. “Admitting my moments of weakness publicly made me feel very vulnerable.”

However, once club members heard her impressive speeches, they recognized her talents and stepped in to help. The club and District 67 helped Cheng find a coach and arranged for her to practice before a variety of groups. Other members coordinated various details so Cheng could focus on the 2024 contest. All of them gave “very constructive feedback,” she adds.

The message of her speech was simple: It’s likely you’ll never be ready for something you want to do. “Just start. You’ll find a way,” she advises.

Still, Cheng was stressed and anxious in the month before the competition. After all, she had little experience in Toastmasters, let alone an international speaking competition. She was more surprised than anyone as she advanced through quarterfinals, semifinals, and at last, to the World Championship stage. She received dozens upon dozens of comments from grateful listeners who were also pushing aside doubts and finding a way to move ahead, just as Cheng was doing.

Aaron Beverly, the 2019 WCPS winner, convinced Cheng that her accomplishments were not due to luck, as she’d feared.

“I thought it was just luck but Aaron told me this: ‘You have to be skilled before you can be lucky. So, if you think you’re lucky, it’s because you’re skilled.’”

It was a lesson she took to heart. “I believe many people have felt like a fraud at some point, so be kind to yourself. Give credit to yourself for your wins.”

Angeli Raven Fitch

In her finals speech, “Replaced by Sophia,” Angeli Raven Fitch shared a disconcerting brush with artificial intelligence (AI) that ultimately rewarded her with renewed personal confidence and belief in the richness of real-life human voices and connections. She set the tone by opening her speech with “Fellow human beings … ”

Fitch, a member of eCommunicators in San Bruno, California, is a lawyer, children’s book author, and popular voice actor. She joined the club in 2023 to “find a community of like-minded people and a playground for having fun while learning to tell stories.” She chose her speech topic after hearing 1995 World Champion Mark Brown narrate a trailer for the 2024 convention.

Brown’s delivery “made me want to talk about my work as a voice actor and what impact AI was having on the human voice,” Fitch says. She believed her story would bring a unique perspective to Toastmasters, who have believed for 100 years in authentic, face-to-face communication.

“Toastmasters is a leadership program which relies on the human voice to convey messages to the world, so how will Toastmasters be prepared for AI voices taking over? I wanted to bring awareness to why the human voice can never be replaced,” she explains.

Fitch was six years into a job she loved as the “voice” of a global healthcare organization, whose mission was to save lives, Fitch says. “I got to communicate those messages daily. It was my dream job.”

After a workday Fitch believed had been exceptionally successful, she learned she was being replaced by “Sophia,” an AI-generated voice.

She was devastated. After a few stressful months spent cursing Sophia, Fitch realized she needed a healthy dose of positivity. She attended a friend’s writing group and had an immediate soul-healing reaction to real people telling real stories during the meeting.

“I could feel the humanity as they told stories,” Fitch says. “I left that meeting with a renewed sense of purpose.”

Ironically, a month later, her former boss called and admitted that Sophia hadn’t worked out.

“I was fired and re-hired for being human,” Fitch laughs.

Fitch is not anti-technology. She continues to study and understand AI’s skyrocketing influence on modern communication. Yet she believes people will still be using their voices 100 years from now: “I believe humanity and technology can co-exist. But nothing can replace the power of the human voice. It’s the heart that beats beneath your words.”