SFL Around the World: April 2017
Here’s what SFL-ers around the world accomplished this April:
Charter Teams
Starting off with Japan, a country that has seen little to no libertarian activism in the past (with the noble exception of Chiaki Nishiyama, a former president of the prestigious Mont Pélérin Society), we are very happy to announce the founding of a new SFL chapter in the land of the rising sun. Meanwhile, Students For Liberty Korea put together a brand-new homepage that’s absolutely worth checking out.
The same goes for our group in Singapore, which is also only about to get started. Their website, which you can find here, also contains an impressive section on “Learning Liberalism,” a project they have been working on during the last year. Read more here!
North America
With over 200 registrants, the Speak Freely Summit provided an opportunity for liberty-minded people to collaborate on the best practices to further free speech on campuses throughout North America. We were honored to host Dave Rubin, Flemming Rose, Casey Given, Faisal Mutar, Sara Taksler, Rob Montz, and Jim Caruso as speakers.
The Free to Be Art Gala took place in New York to stress the importance of the arts in a free society. Artists who were showcased included Joe Salvatore, director of Her Opponent, a gender-swapped version of the 2016 Presidential Debates.
And we were proud to be represented at the National Cannabis Festival in Washington, DC. Read more here!
Europe
Highlighting the beginning of April in Europe, The Spring Academy, organized by Lithuanian Liberal Youth together with ESFL in Lithuania was a great success! Filled with great lectures, workshops and simulations, this event invited the greatest leaders from Lithuania to discuss the ideas of liberty.
Focusing on the future of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, another major event was organized by Georgian Students For Liberty in Tbilisi, Georgia. 220 students gathered at the university of Tbilisi for a day-long conference featuring renowned experts and entrepreneurs.
Almost 100 students from Brno and Prague, in the Czech Republic, attended a series of informal events called “Liberty Evening,” discussing topics such as the sharing economy and “Euthanasia: The Right to Live vs. Right to Die.” Other events in Europe last month included a Leadership Forum in Spain, the Consumers Choice Center launch in Brussels, Belgium, and the Reinvent Education conference in Kyiv, Ukraine. Finally, our leaders from all corners of Europe teamed up and created a video in order to bring more attention to the current situation of LGBT people in Chechnya and to support #Chechnya100. See more here!
South Asia
SASFL Executive Board members have been the lifeline of the liberty movement in South Asia. This month, the Executive Board for the year 2016-17 stepped down to hand the reins to a brand new supercharged Executive Board for the year 2017-18. Here is a small introduction to the Executive Board!
The Campus Caravan on issue-based political dialogue in Kenya visited three more universities in April. In Ghana, we hosted a leadership forum for 21 ASFL leaders from Ghana and Nigeria. The aim of this forum was to bring together ASFL leaders in country to learn from one another and interact about challenges they are facing in the country, how they can solve them and how they can expand to more schools in the country.
The Mexico team has continued their “Ruta de la Libertad” (The Liberty Road) project, in which they travel from city to city doing events. They’ve organized 19 events in the last 4 months and reached 501 people on the ground and almost twice as may through live-streams. They have also been on 8 different press outlets and a radio show.