coffeepartyusa | My section of a Coffee Party history post for Coffee Party's 12th birthday

I began my involvement with Coffee Party USA in February 2010, when my wife showed me "The Snowy Video," which showed Coffee Party co-founder Annabel Park explaining why and how she started the Coffee Party on Facebook the previous month, along her vision for it as she stood holding a covered coffee cup as snow fell around her. I was hooked. Within the month, my wife and I followed the Coffee Party USA Facebook page, then called Join the Coffee Party Movement, participated in organizing calls, and organized and co-led the inaugural meeting of the Ann Arbor Coffee Party as part of the Coffee Party Kick-off on March 13, 2010, one of hundreds of meetings with thousands of participants that day. That day, I created the Ann Arbor Coffee Party Facebook page (now Coffee Party USA-Pennsylvania; I created the Ann Arbor Coffee Party Facebook group to replace it) to communicate with members of the local chapter. I then created the Coffee Party USA community on LiveJournal on March 20, 2010. My wife and I returned two weeks later for the second in-person meeting of the Ann Arbor Coffee Party on March 27, 2010 as part of the National Coffee Party Summit, which featured nearly 500 meetings nationwide. At that meeting, we handed over leadership of the Ann Arbor Coffee Party meetings to another member, as we were moving out of the area. However, I am still the administrator of the Coffee Party USA-Pennsylvania page and the Ann Arbor Coffee Party Facebook group, so my involvement continues.

I wasn't the only person hooked, as "The Snowy Video" helped draw national attention to the Coffee Party. 90,000 people followed the Coffee Party Facebook page by the first week of March and the Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, and C-SPAN all covered the Coffee Party during February and March 2010, including CNN reports on the meetings of the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., chapters and C-SPAN coverage of the National Coffee Party Summit.

I got busy with moving, my teaching career, and the 2010 mid-term election during the spring, summer, and fall of 2010, although I continued to post updates on Coffee Party's LiveJournal community about Coffee Party events, including launching four campaigns, Coffee with Congress, Campus Coffee Week, Clean Up Wall Street, and Clean Up K Street, during April 2010 alone. Coffee with Main Street followed in May and June 2010, including the National Coffee Summit on Corporate Personhood and Money in Politics and an Our Budget, Our Economy event. The Coffee Party Convention took place in Louisville, Kentucky during September 2010, featuring addresses by Laurence Lessig, Mark McKinnon, and Dan Choi. In October, Coffee Party USA participated in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity to close out its in-person events for 2010. I followed all those event with interest, but at a distance, although I became one of the administrators of Coffee Party's Michigan Facebook page during this time as well.

After the election, I decided to become more involved with Coffee Party. I started posting summaries of the activity at Coffee Party's Facebook page to Daily Kos as well as LiveJournal, and then shared links to my Daily Kos diaries at in the comments to Coffee Party's posts on Facebook. That attracted the attention of Coffee Party leadership, who added me to the national team in January 2011. I continued the outreach I had been doing on Daily Kos, LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, the defunct Michigan Liberal group blog, and the Michigan state and local Facebook pages and started writing for the Coffee Party newsletter and was on the team running the Coffee Party's Twitter account. I was a busy keyboard activist for a 21st Century Democracy movement!

Shortly after that, Coffee Party participated in the For the People Summit on January 21, 2011, the first anniversary of the Citizens United decision. C-SPAN, The Nation, Truthout, and Iran's PressTV all covered the event. It ended its first full year with more than 340,000 followers on Facebook. I included both of those events, along with all that Coffee Party did and its orgins as a rant on Facebook in a timeline of the Coffee Party's first year.

During its second year, I promoted Coffee Party's found member fundraising drive. Here is an image of the blank membership card.

I paid the money and joined, so I became a founding member in 2011.

About that time, Coffee Party leadership recruited me to become a member of the Transition Team that planned the future structure of the organization. That's where I met Debilyn Molineaux, whose story begins next.