Every year, the winners of each region’s awards for the best leader, team, and organizers of the best event are nominated for the Students For Liberty Global Awards.
For 2022, after winning the award for European Group of the Year in August, our team from the Czech Republic received our global Group of the Year Award at LibertyCon International in Miami in October.
The Czech team played a particularly active role in the Liberty Opportunity Task Force (LOTF) for Ukraine. They went to the Slovakia-Ukraine border to pick up one of our Ukrainian coordinators and take her to the Czech Republic, while also delivering aid to the border camp set up for refugees. One member of the team hosted a Local Coordinator from Ukraine in his family home for three months, refusing offers from SFL to reimburse her living expenses.
Later on, they participated in several Ukrainian aid events, including as a partner in a humanitarian music festival. The Czech team organized help and collected information for both those leaving Ukraine and those interested in sending help to the country.
They built a new regional website with an active following, including an active blog with over 40 articles written by local coordinators. They organized a number of webinars early in the year and successfully expanded to the country’s second largest city, Brno, with regular events.
The Czech SFL team also facilitated the translation of a book by Prof. Steven Horwitz into Czech, published a 50-page paper on the Bretton Woods system on the 50th anniversary of it’s end with inputs from expert historians and economists, and held weekly events ensuring a constant SFL presence in Prague and Brno, along with two regional conferences attracting over 150 attendees each.
Furthermore, the number of local coordinators has doubled and the team has started a volunteer program to filter and identify the strongest candidates for the LC Program. The Czech team also hosted the 2022 edition of LibertyCon Europe, and FY22 was marked by the increased promotion of Bitcoin and the establishment of partnerships with local crypto organizations.
Since winning the award, the team has organized another conference with over 160 attendees about the war on drugs, bringing together legalization and harm reduction advocates, medical experts, and the chief of the country’s anti-drug police for a constructive discussion. Apart from ongoing regular events, the team is now beginning to focus on new initiatives, particularly around Bitcoin activism, printing policy leaflets in attractive formats, and starting a larger discussion about free market environmentalism.
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This piece solely expresses the opinion of the author and not necessarily the organization as a whole. Students For Liberty is committed to facilitating a broad dialogue for liberty, representing a variety of opinions.
