Proposal: Help fund independent schools / homeschools in exchange for speaking engagements

Activists List
1

Dear freedom lovers,

I continue to believe in the importance of teaching teens and young people (e.g. kids at local high and middle schools) about libertarian ideas. I’m happy to go talk to just about any public group, but I’m always happy to go talk to students and distribute literature to them.

Unfortunately we don’t have a good pipeline for this. Sometimes candidates get invitations when running for office (which is one reason to do that) and occasionally , but I don’t think we’ve ever gotten a few a year at most. I would gladly speak several times a week if the opportunities were available.

So an idea that occurs to me would be to incentivize teachers to invite LPSF speakers to come speak to their classes. Besides myself, this could be any of our members willing to go out and present libertarian ideas, or potentially visiting guest speakers who we scheduled.

Say we offered $5 in free school supplies for each student present at a LPSF guest speaker’s talk lasting 30 minutes or more. Looked at in strictly number terms, we could spend $500 a year in return for the opportunity to address that many students – or 20 classes of 25 students each.

Let the teachers tell us what kind of classroom supplies they want, and then buy the materials ourselves (perhaps purchasing from libertarian suppliers where possible) and have them shipped to them. (Of course we’d need folks willing to do that work – I’ll need help.)

We could put this offer out to independent schools and homeschool groups, since they aren’t getting stolen tax money (and those running them have to get their funding voluntarily).

Do folks think this would be a good use of LPSF funds?

Are there other ideas for what to do with the funds we have in our account? How much should we keep on hand as a rainy day fund?

Love & Liberty,

((( starchild )))

1 Like
2

I like to see how things fit in an overall strategy. Otherwise, it feels to me like there’s endless opportunities, and that can be overwhelming.

That being said, I’m sure that making younger people and students aware of libertarianism (or their brand) is an important component of any overall strategy. Of course, many people believe this, which is why there’s SFL, YAL, YDA, YRNF, etc.

I like your proposal, but two concerns are:

  1. The personal touch is nice and effective, but it seems less sustainable - that is, requires constant effort to produce results. How does it compare to creating or promoting something that has perennial returns, like writing a book for young adults, making a liberty-themed video game, or supporting a student-focused org like SFL?

  2. Some people might find the targeted advertising to youth in exchange for $$ too transactional. I don’t have a problem with it, but others might find it off-putting. Maybe providing resources to students to create their own student-led group instead would be a better approach?

I support all honest activism, and if we have the volunteers for this appraoch, then I think the funds would be well spent. We could add this item to our wiki list of activism ideas / sign-up sheet. We haven’t decided whether it’s a good idea to make that page public yet, because it has all (really, just some) of our ideas.