Mocha Hosts the Coffee Party’s National Coffee Day

On Saturday, March 13, Sandy Hook’s Mocha Coffeehouse

Mocha’s National Coffee Day meeting. Jane Gignoux stands in the middle. was host to one of about 350 gatherings of the new nation-wide grassroots movement known as the Coffee Party. The Coffee Party is a Facebook-born phenomenon which began with an anti-Tea Party rant on Marylander Annabel Park’s profile. Her words spawned a movement that now has almost 160,000 followers on Facebook. According to the Coffee Party website, the movement “aims to reinvigorate the public sphere, drawing from diverse backgrounds and diverse perspectives, with the goal of expanding the influence of the People in America’s political arena.” The movement is not tied to a preexisting party or ideology, and people of all backgrounds and beliefs are welcomed and encouraged to join in the effort to create a better country. Collaboration is the key word here.

When Newtown resident Ben Roberts heard about National Coffee Day, he kicked into high gear to organize Saturday’s event at Mocha. Roberts has been hosting a Monday night “Salon Discussion” at Mocha for about a year, where participants vote on topics and ruminate with one another. He saw his place in the Coffee Party immediately.

Mocha was packed with about 65 people. After a brief introduction, Roberts was elected interim leader. “We are here to relcaim democaracy,” he said. “We are here to move from protest to positive, decisive action.” He then introduced a woman who made the Mocha meeting unique from all of the others held across the country: Jane Gignoux, a trained World Café host. World Café is defined on its website as “a conversational process based on a set of integrated design principles that reveal a deeper living network pattern through which we co-evolve our collective future.” Moreso than communicating what one wanted to say, Gignoux encouraged those at the meeting to focus on deeply listening to one another.

The meeting was broken into groups of four, of whom Gignoux asked to take turns speaking about what had brought them to the meeting. My group included Joe, Linda and Emily. Linda felt frustrated with what she felt was the United States “corporatocracy”. “As an individual I feel powerless,” she said. “This could work.”

Joe came to the meeting after hearing about it only that morning on CNN. He said that he had been thinking about something like this since the formation of the Tea Party. “I’ve watched the democratic process be bought,” he said. “No one’s been punished for bringing the economy down. The United States no longer has any moral authority.”

Emily, a student at Wesleyan University, was in the process of writing her senior thesis on political participation, so she came to the meeting both for research and for curiosity. She spoke about her experience as a freshman with an anti-war protest, which felt “like a big party.”

“Something didn’t appeal to me,” she said. “It wasn’t the message. There was a lot of shouting, a lot of symbolism, but it was empty. We didn’t even go on a work day, so no one was even there. This seems to be a more productive way to be heard.”After the first discussion, Gignoux instructed us to find new groups and talk about what had stirred us from our prior discussion. In this group, Jim and Pete pointed out a big Coffee Party problem: lack of focus. “Too much fragmentation means we’ll never get to anything.”

Next Gignoux asked us what we could get passionate about. Neci wished for a United States Department of Peace that aimed at resolving conflict on an international, state and family level. Pete felt that education should be paramount, that people should be given the tools to listen and stimulate their curiosity. He also wanted people to get involved in the government and be educated to their responsilities. Jim again asked for focus.

“We need to develop a set of goals, “ he said. “We need to communicate what we are.” He brought up that Obama talks about things on a college-education level, which can limit the reach of the message. “We need to be able to communicate with others,” Jim continued. “The language we use has to be pertinent to our focus, not just to certain groups.”

“We need to come up with what we are for,” Pete said, “rather than what we are against. That’s the difference between the Coffee and the Tea Party.”

Other issues that came up were health care, basis human needs and the government’s role in providing them, energy and water shortages, increasing voter participation and eliminating lobbyism. A desire for independent and investigative media echoed throughout the meeting.

Gignoux then asked what was viable, what people could do to continue moving forward. Responses included to increas involvement in politics, to stay excited and to develop listening skills. Two people said “Nothing.”

Much of what was discussed at the meeting were the problems of the United States; not much was said in terms of concrete solutions. It was agreed upon that political involvement is key to a working democracy, but some people came to the meeting in search of something more. Roberts and other meeting-goers tried to reinstill positivity with a reminder that it was only their first time together, that there was no way they could capture everything at once.

It may be that the Coffee Party may never become something cohesive, but the power and energy behind the movement is not something to be dismissed. People across the nation and across all political affiliations are pressing for change, and the meeting brought up the only surefire way in how to do it: action. If each of these 160,000 Facebook fans got involved and educated in the government, be it nationally or locally, change would come. Whatever a person’s politics, they cannot demand a true democracy if they refuse to act within one.