About Welcome to coffee

Community Of Feedback For Ethical Engagement

On this page you can learn more about our mission and community goals. COFFEE was born from a community creation process at the 2025 CHOIR convening in Acadia, ME. Our membership consists of astronomers of various career stages located around the US.

Mission Statement

COFFEE (Community of Feedback for Ethical Engagement) is a collective of people devoted to the important work of astronomy outreach–uplifting our communities through the sharing of our science. In our roles as stewards of scientific knowledge and education, we affirm that we are humans and part of our communities first, and thus, we continually consider and evaluate the impacts of our outreach work on the people we engage with. In particular, we work together to challenge the issues that often make astronomy outreach less effective, including lack of intentionality and consideration of the needs of our target audiences, and the centering of predominantly white, socioeconomically privileged, and academic spaces. To do this, we seek to facilitate connections between astronomers and community members invested in doing outreach ethically. We create pathways for giving and receiving feedback to improve existing initiatives through conversation, and we reflect on our own learned experiences to co-create new resources and build a community of communicators learning from each other. Finally, we support astronomers interested in learning about the implementation of responsible outreach efforts, in order to promote ethical community engagement broadly in our field.

Our Code of Conduct

Community Agreements

We agree to:

Treat others with respect
Take individual accountability for harmful behavior
Refrain from harassment, bullying, discrimination, and intimidation
Refrain from misconduct
Refrain from making false equivalencies between harmful behavior and pointing out harmful behaviors
Keep our feedback respectful and constructive
Listen actively and empathetically to feedback, acknowledging and thanking our community members for their contributions to our outreach
Grow and make changes to our practices in response to feedback
Create an equitable space by balancing making and taking space in conversation, paying attention to social and academic power dynamics at play
Be present and refrain from multitasking during meetings
Take proactive steps to ensure the community is accessible to its members

Community Intentions

Together, we will strive to:

Give and receive feedback for our own programs
Meet regularly and have intentional conversations about our outreach programs and (evolving) goals
Use our meetings to narrow down our goals and get realistic steps in place, help each other work towards our goals
Have a presence in the astronomy community more broadly, give people a way to find us, a way to get more people to think about this (COFFEE website, blog posts about our experiences, lessons learned)
Keep our conversations from staying insulated - provide ways for people to be part of COFFEE asynchronously if they can’t make it to the meetings, share notes from our meetings to the group, share public posts on our website

Through this framework of interaction, we will:

Be more effective and intentional in our outreach
Understand the goals of each event and evaluate the degree of success
Keep the needs of the communities that we’re targeting at the forefront

Future Goals

COFFEE is a developing community and we set the following intentions for our growth in the future:

Bring community members into COFFEE discussions
Reevaluate the ways we’ve defined our COFFEE community to ensure that we continue to be supported by our mission statement and community guidelines