NOTE:
The Coffee Party's first elected Board of Directors invites you to join a collaborative, organic, and transparent process to develop our Strategic Plan as a "living document" in order ensure our methods and philosophies are up to date in a world that is changing at a rapidly accelerating rate. The work below resulted from a collaboration between our Board and our Official Members. We are now inviting public comment. Everyone is welcome to contribute ideas, and everyone is welcome to borrow from them. There are forms for submitting comments and suggestions below (one for Official Members who elect the Board of Directors, and one for valued voices in our community who are not yet voting members). For some background on how this work was accomplished, please read Eric Byler's March 10 blog "Coffee Party Shifting Focus."
Mission Statement
Connecting communities to reclaim our government for the People.
Vision Statement
Coffee Party USA envisions a nation of diverse communities sharing a culture of informed public engagement where our sacred right to vote is the only currency of our democracy.
Strategic Plan
Problem
News, information, and political discourse have been professionalized and consolidated under the dominion of poweful media empires with morally ambiguous loyalties and objectives. Viewing audiences, particularly older ones as studies show, have come to confuse high ratings and conflict-driven entertainment with reliable news and information sources, to our nation's peril.
For America to succeed in the 21st century, we must make better decisions. To do that, we must transform ourselves from clusters isolated by geography, culture, or ideology into an Intelligent Network, connected through trans-media communications. The Coffee Party USA has been an early, comparatively successful model for such a network. But America needs us to do better — much better.
We know there is a growing subsection of society that has not developed entrenched news and information gathering habits. Increasingly, Americans are seeking out multiple sources of information, doing so in a creative and evolving manner, and doing so primarily via the web. Soon, the Internet will overtake television as the most frequently used media conduit. This bodes well for We the People, as the Internet is where we've had the most success competing with narratives that flow from our resident media empires. However, we are concerned that many Americans have a limited interest in journalistic and political content, due to the partisanship, misinformation, and incivility that has characterized it in recent decades. People are working very hard, focused on survival, and when they do have time for media content, they seek out more engaging and more entertaining ways to connect with the world at large.
How can we create an Intelligent Network that appeals to diverse audiences, and encourages everyday Americans to embrace their natural intellectual curiosity, their natural desire to connect with other people, and their natural sense of civic duty as paths to empowerment? [MORE]
The Bottom Line
The subject of this "War on Women" mischief ranges from very gender-specific assaults (contraception, abortion, reproductive health care), to social and cultural neglect (employment, wage equality, domestic violence, and the social safety net), and political abuse (marriage inequality, voter ID and registration “crack downs”) that disproportionately affect women. As disturbing as these may be, there are even more basic principles at work here that are fundamentally outrageous to me.
by Will Rice
