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When I applied to become a local coordinator in 2011, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I thought I would be involved with a pretty great organization for a year, add the experience to my resume, and move on having known I’d done some small thing to advance the cause of liberty.
So why two years later, am I finishing up a second year as a local coordinator and taking time to write that anyone who is dedicated to the cause of freedom and ready to work hard to make some serious impact should have applied yesterday?
I’m doing this because I don’t know any better way to learn the things I’ve learned — the things that make impactful and thoughtful activism possible.
The local coordinator program drastically changed the way I think about my goals and how they fit into the broader movement for liberty. It did so by exposing me to a very peculiar community.
Mine was the second ever local coordinator class, and, while small compared to this past year’s, it seemed quite large when I arrived at the coordinator retreat two summers ago.
But even if it had been a very small group, it would have been bigger than most in an important way. SFL’s local coordinator classes are incredibly diverse. The ideas I was exposed to and specifically the culture of open-mindedness led me to not only experience new ideas, but to look critically at my own.
This meant looking at totally new theories of social change and tactics for building a freer society. But more importantly, it also meant re-evaluating what I thought the end game looked like. It meant considering that achieving a freer world was not just about a set of predefined goals, but about asking the very important questions about what freedom looks like.
It meant asking not only, “How do we get there?” but also “How do we ensure that once we get there the world stays free?” This group, more than any other I’ve seen, is one in which everyone involved is committed to ideas and to questioning ideas.
Students For Liberty was founded on the basis that ideas matter and that the struggle for liberty is a struggle for minds and it shows through in everything we do. But this is especially the case in the dynamic groups of individuals that make up each local coordinator class. SFL does a great deal to create spaces for these conversations to occur. The fact that everyone is free to fulfill their job as a local coordinator in the best way they see fit certainly helps encourage these conversations.
Here’s where I start to sound like a broken record: community matters. I’ve posted a few times on this site alone about how important I think communities are. Forgive me for saying it once more: communities matter a lot.
This is the advice your mom gave you when you were ten. Your friends matter because your friends make you who you are. Community and culture are absolutely huge forces in society and one goal for anyone hoping to live in a freer future should be to foster a community of liberty, a culture that values personal freedom and individual agency.
If you want a prototype for what that society is going to look like, look no further. The community of SFL’s leadership and specifically the culture of the local coordinator program is one which empowers and values the individual.
No one here will ever tell you that your idea is dumb, that you don’t matter, or more importantly, that the group for any reason supersedes you. The collective, the community, is there to empower the individual, not squash it. The local coordinator program is what a community of liberty looks like, and I feel that forming these small-scale communities is the first step towards changing our culture.
Our lived experiences inform our future ways of being, and the more we immerse ourselves in a culture of freedom, the easier it is to act in a way that shows others how valuable freedom is.
So now, two years later, my ideas have changed a hundred times and my understanding of the world and of the many viewpoints in it has expanded a hundredfold.
I have learned so much from my fellow local coordinators that it would be impossible to list and probably unfair to give a partial list. But more importantly, I feel like I’ve lived for two years at least partially in a world that is already a little bit more free. This is what gives me hope for the success of our project and allows me to live it more and more each day.
To learn more about our local coordinator program, be sure to check our program page by clicking on the button below.
Written by Alex McHugh
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.
