The coffee isn’t cold just yet.
A group of progressives who call themselves the Coffee Party and who attracted national media exposure by forming what was billed as the liberal response to the Tea Party movement has scheduled a summer national convention for its activists in Kentucky.
The inaugural national convention of the Coffee Party is named “Wake Up and Stand Up, America!” and is set to take place in Louisville this September.
“This event will be an exciting and historic opportunity to meet fellow Coffee Partiers from around the country, going beyond virtual relationships to real friendships,” an announcement on the group’s Web site reads.
The convention will include sessions “with organizers from around the country to share best practices” on such things as dialogue facilitation, voter engagement, conflict resolution, community organizing, social media and media outreach.
Along with workshops with “leading experts” on a number of policy topics, the Louisville get together will include dinners and mixers.
The group formed out of a YouTube video by former Obama volunteer Annabel Park, who did not hide her problems with the conservative, grassroots Tea Party movement. “Do you believe that the government can help us address these enormous problems that were facing?” Park said in the original video. “If you don’t believe the government has any role, then yeah, you should join the Tea Party.”
But while originally billed as a liberal counter to the Tea Parties across the country, the Coffee Party’s philosophy has seemed to veer away from that. The group claims to be welcoming of all political ideologies and diverse “ethnically, geographically, politically, [and] in age and in experience.”
During an interview in April with The Daily Caller, one Coffee Party attendee, China Dickerson, said the goal of the meetups is to bring “everyone together to work together” in a movement like the “civil rights, the women’s movement [and] the homosexual movement.”
In February, several hundred Tea Party activists gathered in Nashville, Tenn. for the first Tea Party National Convention. By picking Louisville for its convention, the Coffee Party will be gathering in the same state where Tea Party favorite Rand Paul was just nominated by Republicans for the Senate.
