Štěpán Kovář, a math and IT major from Prague, is at the age of 21 our youngest Regional Coordinator in Europe, while at the same time leading one of our largest regional teams with currently 36 Local Coordinators in Central Europe and being an active participant in the Prometheus Fellowship.
Under Štěpán’s leadership as a National and then Regional Coordinator, the Czech team grew to 21 Coordinators at the end of FY23, compared to the six active volunteers at the time he took up a senior role. In FY23 alone, Štěpán himself organized 13 local events in Prague in addition to a regional conference and supervised a similar number of events in Brno. The videos on the Czech SFL YouTube channel for which he records the events had over 6000 views during FY23.
The FY23 regional conference in Prague with the title Legalize It!, and whose organization Štěpán led, attracted over 160 attendees (48 percent of whom had never heard of Students For Liberty before) and featured SFL students and alumni as speakers, but also the government expert on harm reduction and leader of expert group on cannabis legalization, a debate with the Director of the Czech Drug Police, and a live interview with Lyn Ulbricht.
For the purpose of the conference, Štěpán organized and designed an End the Drug War factographic booklet, which has since received a second edition sponsored by a partner from a harm reduction society who became interested in SFL as a result of the conference.
As a true leader, Štěpán’s focus has however always been on his team. By the end of FY23, 5 out of the top 10 European Coordinators on the leaderboard were from his region. The region itself grew — in FY23, for the first time, there is an active and growing team in Hungary.
Štěpán made sure that all teams in the region had a chance to interact by organizing the largest Central European Coordinator Retreat yet, gathering students from Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, and Hungary, with 28 attending sessions prepared by alumni and the students themselves. His dedication to the team is further exemplified by his willingness to travel over 800 km to help out an ill team member at an event he did not originally plan to attend, on more than one occasion.
His own main interest lies however in Bitcoin and AI. In FY23, Štěpán started the Bitcoin Activism Project, intended to raise awareness on the problems of the current monetary system, and provide educational opportunities in the public space. The project launched in January with a projection on the Czech National Bank, and continued with an information campaign on the benefits of Bitcoin. Part of the campaign have been creative tablings, with popular photo booths of “Bitcoin mining” and much more.
Besides that, he gave an Intro to Bitcoin training session at TLR 2022, led an interview with Stephan Livera for the upcoming printed Bitcoin issue of the Speak Freely magazine, closed partnerships with Braiins, Chaincamp and organizers of BTCPrague for monetary and in-kind donations, and added a lightning network donation method to the SFL CZ website.
Last but not least, Štěpán has been working with local Czech partners on a project that has since the beginning of the war delivered over 800k USD worth of aid to Ukraine, and staged demonstrations in front of the Russian embassy in Prague.
He forged a partnership with the Czech organization and the Director of Ukrainian Students For Freedom, which resulted in first such conference in Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine in July 2023 on the reconstruction of Ukraine, with the goal of bringing international stakeholders to see for themselves, interact with Ukrainians, and discuss how best to support a country recovering from the consequences of the invasion.
For all his accomplishments, Štěpán is our European Leader of the Year, and one of the three finalists for Students For Liberty’s global awards.
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.
