Students For Liberty recently reached an all-time high: We have student leaders in 116 countries, having added 15 new countries over the past year, including five in Africa, three in Eastern Europe (Ukraine, most notably), and war-torn but rebuilding Syria.
However, Brazil remains SFL’s shining star. Q1 of last year saw a record 38 events, attracting 866 attendees, and 69 applications to our program. In all, a whopping 437 active volunteers live there, and what they are accomplishing is almost unimaginable.
Clube Farroupilha, for example, is an institution focused on intellectual development and leadership training for students in the municipality of Santa Maria. The Club has 13 active student leaders and over the past year, it has taken off. On June 7th, the club hosted the 11th — and biggest yet — edition of the Lead UP Forum in Santa Maria. Although it took place far from the major urban centers of Brazil, the event brought together more than 350 students with the theme Awaken New Connections. The forum stood out for its practical and innovative format, prioritizing real-world skills, professional development, and meaningful networking over traditional academic lectures. It’s a powerful example of how liberty can inspire action and transformation, no matter the location.
In the north of Brazil, the Entrepreneurs Project in Pará became part of a new SFL Brazil initiative to mentor student-led projects.
Instituto Atlantos, in the city of Porto Alegre, celebrated its 10th anniversary as an independent, nonprofit student think tank on a bittersweet note: the floods that washed over its region were devastating. But with Students For Liberty Brasil, Atlantos launched a crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $20,000 to help those most in need during the worst of the crisis. Additionally, Atlantos produced the Public Policy Notebook for Flood Control in Rio Grande do Sul, which outlined 10 policy proposals rooted in classical liberal ideas like decentralized control, bottom-up organization, and private property to address the issue of flooding in the future. The report launched at the Porto Alegre City Council and was ultimately delivered to dozens of public officials at the municipal, state, and federal levels.
Flood relief was a critical topic for our network in Brazil, in part because it’s bipartisan. Take SFLer and law student Gabriele Calesso Benini, who wrote of her trip to CONUBES, the National Congress of Secondary School Students: “At the event — inside a stadium packed and colored red — I realized that my place was in politics and student activism. I took the stage and was met with shouts — not just ‘neoliberal,’ but ‘fascist.’ I mentioned my home state and the natural disaster we were going through; in that way, I managed to humanize our cause and won over some of the audience.”
Last year, 22 SFL Brazil alumni ran for office in their city legislatures, and eight won their races. Marcela Trópia won re-election with a promise to de-bureaucratize the economic sector in her city of Belo Horizonte. “I’m going to keep going,” she said, and in doing so, unwittingly summarized the entire liberty movement in Brazil — a movement that is led by Students For Liberty.