European Students For Liberty consist of almost 30 national teams. Every year, we celebrate the achievements of the most accomplished or fastest growing team by awarding the Group of the Year award. In 2024, our Group of the Year is Students For Liberty Portugal.
Even before LibertyCon Lisbon 2023, the team in Portugal has been on an upward trajectory, and has continued growing since then, to recently become one of our largest groups in Europe by number of coordinators with regular activities going not just in the country’s two biggest cities, Lisbon and Porto, but also in other regional centres.
Over the course of the year, the team organised 59 events that together attracted 2389 attendees. Among these events were the team’s autumn regional conference “Liberty Next” (and which since returned for another edition), focusing on technology, innovation and liberty, as well as local events, and the team’s popular “Beer without Taxes” events, pointing out the high taxation on consumer goods.
One of the team’s most impactful events was a lecture with David Friedman in Porto, which was attended by 350 people, thanks to the team’s securing 80 free posters and billboards in public spaces in the city. Team Portugal has also for two years now been a feature at the country’s largest student organisations and universities fair.
Some of the team’s other events include a John Galt School, and creative approach to activism focused on market approaches to environmentalism and conservation by their communal work at public farms.
Alongside all that, Students For Liberty Portugal has taken steps to institutionalise itself and build up processes, by launching their own website, running a regular newsletter and its own publication platform, the Liberty Factory, which helps the team’s members get published in local and national media outlets. They also started regional social media, alongside their national accounts, and their reach has increased tenfold over the course of the last year.
Many of the team’s activities have been possible thanks to local partnerships and fundraising.
All these successes have earned the team the award for the Group of the Year for 2024.
