Student Impact Stories
Student Impact Stories
At Students For Liberty, we focus on ideas and people. Ideas are what help us get from one point to another, but people are the messengers of these ideas, and there are no better messengers than our students. These students are the next generation of leaders of liberty.
Our vision is a freer future, and we aim to make this vision a reality by educating, developing, and empowering our student leaders.
Thus, it is important for our students to not only understand the operations of Students For Liberty, but also believe in our purpose, and become enthusiastic agents of change in their communities.
Today, Students For Liberty is the world’s largest organization supporting pro-liberty students who are working towards our shared vision of a freer future for all, but it wasn’t always like this. Before SFL, being a pro-liberty student on campus was a very lonely experience.
If a student was lucky enough to be on a campus with a pro-liberty group, it was most likely less than two years old and only kept going because of the founder’s enthusiasm for bringing the same few recurring members to meetings.
Such groups were unsustainable and would collapse as soon as the founder graduated or became too busy to continue the work. The idea of a global student movement for liberty was once unfathomable.
This all changed when, in the summer of 2007, a few students held a roundtable to discuss best practices for running pro-liberty groups. That roundtable inspired Alexander McCobin, Sloane Frost, and Sam Eckman to organize the first International Students For Liberty Conference.
This conference vastly exceeded their expectations when over 100 attendees turned up at Columbia University during a snowstorm. Realizing they had tapped into something special, they identified a growing need for a student driven pro-liberty movement, and so they continued to move forward.
In 2008, Students For Liberty was incorporated as a 501(c)3 nonprofit. SFL began to attract passionate pro-liberty students and started to grow the organization into a vibrant movement.
From then until now, SFL has grown massively. But this growth did not occur on its own. Every stage of SFL’s existence and development was met with new challenges and obstacles to overcome. It took the hard work and dedication of the thousands of students, staff, and donors from around the world to make SFL the multi-million dollar organization and international network that it is today.
Now, SFL has a presence on every habitable continent. For operational purposes, we divide this network into eight international regions: North America, Europe, Africa, South Asia, Brazil, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Charter Teams, who work on expanding the movement into new countries and regions.
In this section, you’ll learn more about these students and how they are effecting change on their campuses and beyond.
Happy Reading!
