Dear Friends of Liberty,

Every championship baseball team has a farm system. The major leagues don’t find polished stars. They develop them. Through A-ball and Double-A, before anyone outside the organization knows their name, players are coached, tested, and built into the people who eventually take the field where it counts.

The liberty movement needs the same thing. The think tanks, the policy shops, the legal foundations do vital work. But they need a pipeline. An organization that finds young people who believe in freedom before the world has told them to stop, and turns them into people who can actually change things.

That is what Students For Liberty exists to do. And this fiscal year, the pipeline is fuller than it has ever been.

Let me tell you about a kid named Trenton Hale.

Trenton grew up working the register at his father’s used clothing store in Kentucky. He watched taxes and COVID lockdowns grind that small business down year by year. He couldn’t explain exactly why it felt wrong. Not yet. Then he found Students For Liberty.

Trenton didn’t just read about liberty. He wrote three books on it. He didn’t just complain about bad policy. Inspired by SFL students in Tennessee who helped pass a law giving students the right to carry self-defense tools on campus, he drafted a companion bill in Kentucky. It will be introduced in January. And it already caught the attention of a United States Senator.

Trenton Hale is now interning in the office of Senator Rand Paul.

He is 22 years old. He is already shaping federal legislation. Trenton is not an exception. He is what the farm system produces when it is working.

This fiscal year, Students For Liberty received 795 Local Coordinator applications in North America alone, an all-time record. These are not students we recruited. They came to us. In a year when young people have every reason to be cynical, record numbers of Americans decided they wanted to become principled leaders for liberty. That is not a marketing win. That is a cultural signal.

The same model is producing results wherever we operate. In Canada, an SFL student organized petitions at 30 universities across all ten provinces and helped push the federal consumer carbon tax to zero. In Sri Lanka, an SFL alumna won a Supreme Court ruling that now prevents any government from invoking emergency powers to suppress peaceful dissent. In Argentina, a young economist named Javier Milei was speaking at SFL events years before anyone knew his name. He is now the president of a country of 45 million people.

None of this happens by accident. Students read Bastiat and Hazlitt. They learn to lead, to communicate, to build coalitions. Then they go work on the issues they care about most. Thinkers first. Doers second. In that order, always. In 2025, our students hosted 3,848 events reaching 226,569 people and delivered 722 trainings to 14,767 young leaders across 116 countries.

The farm system is working. And the next Trenton is filling out an application right now.

Thank you for standing with us.

Sincerely & For Liberty,

Dr. Wolf von Laer 
CEO, Students For Liberty