SFL Around the World: August 2016
In an attempt to better share our current activities with the network, the SFL Around the World blog post series will summarize our biggest news in each region monthly.
Here’s what SFL-ers around the world accomplished in August:
ANZSFL: August saw Australia and New Zealand Students For Liberty select their new Regional Coordinators, who will work to advance liberty in their respective regions! They are:
- Western Australia: Eva Christensen, Darian Whyte, and Julian Hasleby
- South Australia: Robert Bartnik
- Queensland: Campbell Ray, Rodrigo Mello
- New South Wales: Erika Salmon and Cody Findlay
- Victoria: Will Joseph and James Halliday
- Tasmania: Tarek Muhtaseb
- New Zealand: Aidan Carter
Charter Teams: Having had tremendous success across the globe, Students For Liberty first dropped anchor in South East Asia in 2015. After a year of inspiring, motivating, and educating students, our Charter Team successfully held their first ever South East Asia Conference in Jakarta. This was a huge opportunity for SFL Indonesia in the current phase of their movement. They started small (with less than three Charter Team members) and ended up having 20 students working to put this conference together. Check out what attendees got up to by browsing the conference hashtag, #SEASFLC16.
ESFL: It was an extremely busy month (as ever!) for European Students For Liberty. Highlights included the inaugural TOP 100 Retreat, which brought several generations of pro-liberty leaders active in ESFL from all across Europe to discuss strategies for promoting liberty in the coming year, work on regional plans to further the causes they are working on and continue planning on different campaigns.
Meanwhile, thirty students participated in the traditional five-day long Summer Academy organised by leaders from our partner Lithuanian Liberal Youth. A similar academy was also held in Iceland!
EsLib: Estudiantes por la Libertad continued to promote the ideas of liberty in the pursuit of a freer society. This month, the Executive Board Retreat was held in Quito, Ecuador. A Local Coordinator Retreat was also held in Perú. Several other activities were held all along the region. The region saw well-attended monetary policy discussions in Ecuador, sessions on the dangers of socialist violence in Chile, another “Formula of Liberty” event in Bolivia, and much more.
North America: At the beginning of August, we announced world-renowned social psychologist Jonathan Haidt as the first confirmed speaker for the 2017 International Students For Liberty Conference (#ISFLC17).
August also saw attempts to restrict and regulate the Gadsden flag (a popular symbol of freedom), with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission looking to make it a punishable offense for employees to wear attire with the Gadsden flag or similar insignia on it. Our #SaveTheGadsden campaign took social media by storm. Read more about it here.
This August, SFL Canada generated a massive buzz around their #FreeToChoose activism! The highlight of the #FreeToChoose campaign has undoubtedly been the Nanny State Corner Store stunt, which took place on August 11th. SFL Canada took over a Toronto corner store and stocked it with plain-packaged pop, chips, and chocolate.
South Asia: South Asia Students For Liberty has geared up for another year of activism for the liberty movement. 25 students qualified for the Local Coordinator Program after finishing a month-long academic training. The Local Coordinator Retreat was held in Delhi from 29 to 31st Aug and fresh SFLers turned up with lots of enthusiasm. Over the weekend, they learned about SFL’s Theory of Social Change and best practices for recruitment, planned activism for the year and practiced socratic seminars. In other news, South Asia SFL is launching SFL Colloquia this Fall, on topics like ‘Are Vices Crimes?’ and ‘Uberization of the World’.”