The origin of Coffee Party USA and its early days in Michigan

by: Neon Vincent

Tue Dec 28, 2010 at 01:12:09 AM EST

How did Coffee Party USA grow from a rant on someone's Facebook page to a movement with nearly 336,000 supporters in the space of ten months?

Join me, the maintainer of the Coffee Party USA community on LiveJournal, over the fold for an article I wrote for Examiner.com as the Detroit Coffee Party Examiner describing how the Coffee Party USA got its name and started growing, along with reports of the first meetings of the movement in Michigan.

Examiner.com: Coffee Party USA marks six-month anniversary in Michigan
By Vince Lamb, Detroit Coffee Party Examiner
August 21st, 2010 5:36 pm ET.

Exactly six months ago today, on February 21, 2010, Michigan's online chapter of Coffee Party USA was founded when Join the Coffee Party Movement Michigan joined Facebook.  The bean that gave rise to the Michigan Chapter sprouted a few weeks earlier with an entry Annabel Park of suburban Washington, D.C., posted to her Facebook page.

Frustrated with the polarized political climate, Park vented her feelings in a status update.

"let's start a coffee party . . . smoothie party. red bull party. anything but tea. geez. ooh how about cappuccino party? that would really piss 'em off bec it sounds elitist . . . let's get together and drink cappuccino and have real political dialogue with substance and compassion."

Her message hit a nerve. The thousands of responses to her rant from people all over the country signaled to Park that she must do something more.  Two weeks later, on February 14, she created a a short video.  Within a month, Park formed Coffee Party USA, complete with its own website, Facebook page, YouTube channel, and Twitter feed.

Although the movement had already become viral, its meme began spreading at an epidemic rate by the last week of February, when the Washington Post featured Park and Coffee Party USA.  By the first week of March, Join The Coffee Party USA had attracted more than 90,000 fans on Facebook.

Around that time, Park decided it was time for Coffee Party USA to extend its reach out of the Internet into the physical world and declared Saturday, March 13, 2010, National Coffee Party Day.   There, she hoped to unleash the potential of the American people in a common cause by engaging in collaborative dialogue using the Web, social media, and face-to-face meetings over coffee to address the challenges America now faces.

On that Saturday, more than 400 locations nationwide hosted meetings for National Coffee Party Day.  At least four of those were the first face-to-face meetings of Coffee Party USA in Michigan.  The Panera in Troy had the largest initial meeting, with about 50 people.  Eighteen people attended the first meeting at Biggby's on Liberty in Ann Arbor.  The Allen Park meeting saw at least ten people in the local Barnes and Noble.  Bay City also held a meeting.

At each meeting, attendees signed the Coffee Party Civility Pledge, introduced themselves, and explained why they were attending.  Then, they discussed which issues mattered most to them.  The group then prioritized the issues and choose the three most important to the grup as a whole.  For example, the attendees in Ann Arbor decided on health care, green jobs, and financial reform as their important issues. Members of the group then made posters using material that members who had volunteered to coordinate the meetings had brought.  Finally, they posed for photos to be posted, as seen in the Rochester Citizen's coverage of the Troy meeting.

Currently, 282,653 people are fans of Join the Coffee Party Movement on Facebook, including 1,720 who are also fans of Join the Coffee Party Movement in Michigan.*  To find or schedule a meeting in your area, surf over to the How to Get Involved with Local Coffee Party Groups on the Coffee Party USA website.

* At the time of the posting of this diary, Join the Coffee Party Movement has 335,998 followers while Join the Coffee Party Movement in Michigan has 1,835.