Blog
Moving from “Coffee with a Mission” to “Coffee for Imagination and Fellowship”
The rebranding, re-missioning, and re-imagining comes in part due to some lessons we learned during our first two years of business which were designated, respectively, by a grand opening year with the typical challenges and by Covid 2020 in which our main prerogative was to simply survive.
The Decisions We've Been Making Lately
In part one of this two blog series, I discussed some of the fundamental questions that have been going around our organization for the past several months, noting that Covid-19 and its effect on organizations and, in particular, entrepreneurial pursuits, has provided something of a silver lining. As the pandemic coincided with a rather tumultuous first year of business (as that first year often is), we really had a chance to ask some fundamental questions about who we were in the past, who we were at the present, and who we wanted to be in the future. If you haven't...
The Questions We've Been Asking Lately
The answer came: we are nothing without our community and that our proximity to that community is fundamental to answering the question of “who do we need to be?” A Drinklings 3.0 was called for and this time the central identifying element to the business was not “the coffee”, it was not “the place”, it was not even “the mission”: it was the community.
J.R.R. Tolkien On Fairy Stories (Part 1)
J.R.R. Tolkien is almost always evasive. I have a feeling that's not a sentiment he would enjoy. Like many of those that partook in the tradition of late 19th and early 20th-century British literature, Tolkien desired clarity: not clarity in the sense of merely being understood at a subjective level but clarity in the...
Covid and Culture - (No. 3) - Learn to Mute the Sound
In the last blog, we overarchingly discussed the fact that, notwithstanding the fact that this particular crisis is a global health pandemic, we do have a rare opportunity to look in the mirror and ask some hard questions about how we individually and socially practice lifestyles and rhythms. I do, very intentionally, use the word we there because I am trying myself to do this. One of the things I fear most is that globally and societally (especially here in the U.S.), we end up returning to the rat race and muddled priorities and false gods that have left us exhausted, burnt...