The Bridge Alliance Education Fund Citizen's Pledge

Coffee and politics are better with friends. That's why Coffee Party USA builds partnerships with diverse groups sharing key common goals. And yes, we do sometimes clash on where we're going. But we do agree wholeheartedly on how we should get there: Through active civic engagement; caring, respectful, and fact-based public discourse; and a free, fair, and open election process.

Below is a list of the many organizations we've partnered with to inform, engage, and empower people and communities across America.

List of Coffee Party USA partners

• Bridge Alliance: A coalition of over 50 organizations working together as active stewards of our democratic republic. Member organizations span the ideological spectrum, but are unified to work efficiently, outside arbitrarily defined political lines.
• Bridge Alliance Education Fund: The public education partner of Bridge Alliance.
• Citizen Connect: Citizen Connect is a non-partisan platform dedicated to helping Americans right, left and center find ways to heal our divides and strengthen this great nation.
• The Fulcrum: A platform where political insiders and outsiders are informed, meet, talk, and act to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives. 
• Listen First Project: A movement to heal America by bridging divides. 450+ organizations bringing Americans together across differences.
• Living Room Conversations: Living Room Conversations are a simple way to connect across divides - politics, age, gender, race, nationality, and more.
• National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers: A member led association dedicated to structural reforms in the public interest, favoring robust competition of numerous political parties and independents with a level playing field on which that can occur.
• The Trust Network: A network dedicated to preventing violence, reduce division, strengthen our democracy and address legacies of injustice. This network is a collaboration across sectors of peacebuilding, social justice and democracy work.

Check out the member listings for these networks of organizations.

Coffee Party USA's goals & issues

Coffee Party USA launched in 2010 with a plea, "can't we talk this over with a cup of coffee?" -- an alternative to the Tea Party tactics of disruption -- and in response to the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC decision. We are a grassroots, national, cross-partisan movement whose mission is to build, nurture and connect communities to reclaim our government for the people.

Our path to restoring America’s republic and representative democracy:

• Identifying and advocating for legislative fixes to reform campaign finance laws, Wall Street regulations, and the tax code;
• Promoting cultural changes to address political disengagement, polarization, and widespread misinformation.

About us: our activities

Our activities often center around encouraging inclusive, civil, fact-based, solution-oriented dialogue — online and in public places such as coffee houses — in which we meet, talk, become informed and engaged as fellow Americans, rather than as members of political parties.

We believe that we share common goals as a people. We all want to live in safe communities with access to well-paid jobs that will allow us to provide for our families, help us secure a decent education for our children, and allow us to access adequate health care. We call upon the American people to transcend the hyper-partisanship that is so common today and move toward organizing communities around the mutual desire for ongoing, responsible civic engagement.

We understand that we must act boldly to not only break the cycle of corruption but also recommit to the concept of a government of, by, and for the people. We are the government. The government is us. We want to fix the problems in our government, not turn against the idea of government.

We need more – in quantity and quality – direct engagement with our government officials and with one another. Participating in our representative democracy should not be about just voting every 2 to 4 years – relying only on what appears in mainstream media and in campaign ads – and then hoping for the best. We need to engage the government in a way that promotes accountability to the public, transparency, and the spirit of E Pluribus Unum (out of many voices, one).

We need to create effective civic engagement opportunities by:

• Demanding more officially sanctioned activities such as town hall meetings with officials and public reviews of policies with an invitation for public comments;
• Organizing informal community meetings in which we invite fellow Americans to exchange ideas.
• Encouraging the use of internet communications, social networking, and polling technologies to more effectively inform and involve the broad public community in an interactive debate.

We operate entirely independently of political parties and we do not endorse candidates. 

Photo of Statue of Liberty in featured image CC by 2.0 William Warby via Flickr (with modifications).

Our name implies that if Americans sat down and had a cup of coffee in a cafe or at a living room coffee table, we would find a spark of common ground. High praise for The People? No, just our experience.

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Coffee Party USA announces the 2020 Golden Coffee Cups movie shortlists, Part 2: Actors.

Each year, we invite our volunteers and followers to stream the movies in which our nominated and winning actors performed to encourage their appreciation of politics and government in film. Our annual Golden Coffee Cups Awards also invites iyou to watch for the third installment of the movie shortlists, which will recognize the appearances by public officials in shortlisted documentaries.

Today your all-volunteer Board of Directors is pleased to announce the next phase for Coffee Party USA.