FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
The Agora Speakers International Foundation is a European secular educational charity that empowers people to become brilliant communicators and confident leaders who will be actively building a better world. We provide a specialized educational program focused on developing leadership, public speaking, critical thinking, and debating skills.
As a true charity, for clubs that are open to everyone all our activities and educational materials are totally free, with no sign-up, membership, or chartering costs of any kind, nor any kind of mandatory purchases. Starting a local club is also free.
The core model we use - learning by working on specific, goal-oriented, or scenario-based projects of increasing complexity and receiving feedback and evaluation on each of them - has been around for over 2.000 years, and in fact, is shared by many other public speaking organizations, workshops, seminars, and clubs.
Memberships are FREE.
Education programs are customized for work and life.
New programs are being developed for advanced speakers to cope with new challenges in our society.
Meet awesome new friends — new speakers and professional speakers
Worldwide speech contests.
50 countries, United Nations standards, founded in Spain.
Our Educational System involves five pillars:
The Educational program consists of different activities and projects that professionals have written to help you become an effective speaker, a brilliant debater, and a confident leader. They are structured so that you start from very simple things, even if you have zero experience in these fields or are a complete introvert, and slowly but steadily lead you to more and more advanced projects. The best part is that you'll start seeing improvements almost right away.
The Educational Program has been created by accomplished and successful professionals with many decades of experience in public speaking, psychology, leadership, story writing, and many other fields.
All the materials of the Educational Program are available online, totally free, for all Agora members.
Our Education System is firmly grounded on scientific research.
Public speaking (and in general all soft skills training) is, unfortunately, one of those areas where self-help books have propagated many misconceptions and bogus or useless advice, copied and passed on from other books and courses.
Here's a test you can do: Pick up any public speaking program that teaches persuasion and check if they include Monroe's Motivated Sequence. They will probably do - and some will even tell you that this is "THE" organizational speech pattern that you need to use every time you need to persuade people. Well, research shows that this particular pattern doesn't have any more persuasive power than any other reasonably organized speech and that, in fact, you can mingle up or completely reverse all the sections of the Motivated Sequence, and the persuasive effect would remain the same.
Here's another test: Most public speaking courses will tell you that you should strive to have absolutely no filler words and word parasites in your speech. Well, research actually shows that if your speech is completely devoid of any filler words, you will be perceived as artificial, and your credibility will suffer.
One of our Educational Program's core features, and one that we particularly take pride in, is that it is firmly grounded on scientific research. Every advice that you will read, every activity that you will perform, every project that you will deliver is the result of analyzing the scientific literature to make sure that the advice is grounded on studies that prove that it works.
Research has shown that even moderate proficiency in a skill (be that tennis, dancing, swimming, or public speaking) requires practice, usually well beyond the number of hours devoted to practice in professional courses.
Consider this: Imagine you want to learn to cook great dishes. You have several options:
Sign up for an intensive 1 or 2-week course with a famous chef, create some dishes one time, spend a lot of money, and hopefully, after that, you're already an expert.
Join a cooking group. Every week, you'll be reading how to create a single dish from the online materials, and you will cook that dish for all members of your group. Everyone will taste it and give you their feedback. If you're satisfied, you can move to a different dish the following week. If not, you can repeat it. Each new dish you cook will be more and more complex. You do this "loop" week after week for several months, without spending any money. Additionally, in the cooking group, you'll practice different specific cooking skills.
Alternatively, you can simply read a lot about cooking, watch a lot of videos, and trust that when the time comes to prepare something for your guests, you'll be ready.
Which approach do you think will be best?
Agora takes the second approach - you'll have access to our educational materials, crafted by professionals with the specific goal of taking you from the very basics of public speaking, leadership, and debating to more and more advanced concepts.
But don't trust our word for it. Record yourself, join a club for some time, re-record yourself, and you'll be amazed at how much you have progressed in such a short period of time.
Of course, you'll only improve if you attend meetings regularly and take roles in them. If you only go to your Agora club once a month, or even less frequently - you're wasting your time. It would be like trying to become a piano player or a dancer by playing or dancing once a month.
Agora Clubs the place where all the fun takes place. They are independent entities that are affiliated with Agora and are created and run locally by volunteers. Clubs hold regular meetings every week, two weeks, or every month, either physically, online, or a mix of the two.
Clubs provide a place where Agora members meet, learn, and practice using the educational program - a safe, fun, and supportive environment where you can experiment without fear and hone your skills until you're ready to "fly out of the nest".
If there's no Agora club nearby, you can start one yourself. Anyone can start a club. The only things needed are time, energy, and at least 8 members. We provide many support and training materials specifically for club founders, so drop us a note if you're interested.
Clubs have a lot of freedom in designing their activities. You will notice that although all the clubs generally follow the same approach and guidelines of the Foundation, they have very different personalities, atmospheres, and feelings.
Do you want to get a feeling of how a club meeting looks like? Check any of the recordings on our Youtube channel.
If you already know a Club you would like to join, write to the person listed as a contact point for that club or to the Vice President, Membership (VPM). If you don't know any club, you can:
Check the global country page to see if there is a local group for your country.
Join the local group and see which clubs are available.
Attend one of their meetings as a guest.
Ask to join!