Once you have a group of students who are dedicated to starting the organization, you must agree upon a common vision for the organization. This covers the values your organization embraces, and the activities you will engage in. The values drive the existence of the organization and what all organizational efforts promote. Determine how broad/specific you want to be, but make sure to leave room for some debate so the group does not dictate the specifics of peoples’ lives.
The activities, cover the strategy for promoting your values. There are three general types that you can engage in: networking, education, and activism. Networking involves providing a forum where individuals of a common belief may come together to meet one another. Having an organization that brings students who support liberty together leads to the mutual encouragement for individuals to stay strong in their beliefs and develop their enthusiasm for liberty. Education is important because no student, not even yourself, is an expert on the philosophy of liberty. As part of an institution of learning, your organization will be missing an incredible opportunity to teach others about your beliefs if you do not make education fundamental to your organization’s activities. Activism could mean holding protests and demonstrations against a new city ordinance. This could mean taking on an illegitimate speech code at your university by writing op-eds to the school paper and petitioning the administration. The general theme underlying activism is an effort to make some sort of policy change in the near future. A student organization is more than capable of subsuming all three of these types of activities at once. You can do social events along with a lecture series on liberty, and protest unjust laws. But you may not want to do this. If there is a tangible problem you want to address on campus, networking is not such an issue as activism. If your campus is too politically apathetic to raise any attention from this activity, though, then you may want to focus on education and networking. It’s important to think about what you want to get out of the organization and what sort of change you hope to make.[1]
Continue to Step 3: Come Up With a Name
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[1] For sample mission statements, please visit www.studentsforliberty.org/college/publications and review the sample student organization constitutions provided, which include mission statements.
