“Wanna grab coffee?” Asked this, you’ll probably rendezvous at a local cafe or the Starbucks down the street. Now, ask Rob Deaton this same question—he’ll send you coordinates.
This is the premise for Secret Spot Coffee Club, an event Deaton hosts as the founder of Ripple Social Club, a meetup group for people in their twenties and thirties looking for community across the Triangle. Inviting members to the monthly coffee event, he sends coordinates to attendees, 24 hours before the meetup begins, with only two things on the packing list: a mug and a sense of direction.
Here, the fun begins: maybe the meetup is a creek off the trail of William B. Umstead State Park or maybe, as it is today, it’s a two mile hike to an abandoned cabin at Eno River State Park. Either way, Deaton offers the same reward: fresh drip coffee, new community, and conversation.
For today’s meetup, I’ve bushwhacked through dirt trails snaked along the Eno River, with one hand holding my mug and the other clutching my phone as I come closer to the pin drop displayed on Google Maps. A hundred feet to my destination, I roam off the path through a field of weeds as the cabin unveils itself underneath the park’s towering oak trees. Four of the club’s members stood in front of the structure’s ramshackled door as they surrounded Deaton, who, crouching down, reached for my mug and poured me drip coffee.
For Raleigh native Deaton, who also runs a junk removal company called Junk Daddy, this event pays homage to the jobs he held and cities he lived in, before moving back to the Triangle earlier this year.
“The guide business that I ran in D.C. for backpacking and kayaking was very targeted towards [the] 20s and 30s crowd that found themselves in a new city, because D.C. is so transient,” says Deaton, who moved to the Pacific Northwest after D.C., where he took up mountaineering and climbing. Still, hiking with only one or two people at a time caused him to crave more connection, so when he decided to move back to Raleigh, he was motivated to find community. To do so, he realized that his goal could come through helping others find a community as well.
“I think that a big problem is the consistency of showing up,” Deaton says of the difficulties people his age face with finding and plugging into community.
Though many credit the pandemic with being a root cause for increasing feelings of loneliness and isolation, the trend has only continued to rise in the years since—especially among young adults. According to a report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common project, 24% of people between 18 to 29 years of age reported serious feelings of loneliness, while the rate for 30 to 44 year-olds is even higher, at 29%.
Such feelings of isolation also play out in the Triangle, which is one of the top ten fastest-growing metro areas in the country, with The Wall Street Journal ranking Raleigh in its top five hiring hot spots for recent college grads. Still, despite this influx, Triangle transplants often feel disconnected.
A wave of social clubs have popped up across the nation, in response to these loneliness trends, with platforms like Meetup becoming more popular. Still, it’s hard to stay connected.
Deaton built Ripple Social Club as a remedy to this collective struggle. It has frequent group events: A meet and greet dinners every Wednesday, volleyball or cycling on Thursdays, and pottery club every other Friday.
Creating consistency became key when he began building the club’s infrastructure.
“If you keep seeing the same people that you are interested in seeing, if you have an easy way to just keep seeing those people, those friendships and those relationships and community naturally build over time,” Deaton said. “When I started this, I wanted to make that easy for people.”
Still, the element of the club model that Deaton said is most crucial to maintaining social momentum is also its most controversial: a paid membership.
Ripple Social Club has a $27 per month membership fee to join the “Members-Only” events that the club hosts. And when Deaton posted about the club on a local Reddit forum several months ago, the pushback was immediate, with comments like, “Monetizing social clubs. That’s the answer to the loneliness epidemic?”
Deaton said his decision to integrate a membership fee boiled down to two factors: accountability and quality.
“I think that for a lot of free events, whether it’s true or not, people interpret them as being low value and don’t mentally invest in showing up at all, and if they do show up, they don’t put in effort to make it a good event,” he said, citing accountability as something that helps people keep showing up, as with a gym membership.
With the membership fees, Deaton said he is able to pay for things like hosting leathercraft workshops, buy drip coffee for Secret Spot Coffee Club, and organize dinners without members incurring any additional payment.
His philosophy isn’t idiosyncratic—the club’s 80 members who pay the monthly subscription seem to agree, especially those who made the hike for July’s Secret Spot Coffee Club.
There’s Aakash Jain, who, leaning against a tree and mug in hand, moved to the Triangle three years ago. He’s been to a handful of Meetup events, but seeing Ripple’s approach of repeatedly bringing the same group of people together in intimate settings attracted him towards the club. He feels that Deaton’s paid membership model is justified.
“If it’s free, then it’s open to everyone,” Jain said, “and thousands of people can join. They are part of the group [but] they are not contributing. They are not showing up. It’s too much dilution in your membership. If it’s paid, then you have a focus group.”
Then there’s Heather Aycock, who calls Ripple the “exact community” she was looking for when she moved to the area in December 2025. With the subscription, she believes she’s getting the chance to meet other people intentional about finding community.
“There’s also social meetups that have happened outside of the formal Ripple community as a result of being connected,” she said. She pointed across to Jain, who brought a few members like herself to salsa dancing classes, where they made more friends who became part of the social club as well. “It’s kind of formed really organically in some ways.”
Taking initiative to meet outside of Ripple’s scheduled events is what Deaton calls the “secret sauce” to what he hopes to accomplish with the club.
“We have scheduled events like volleyball and pickleball, but people in the group step up and [say], ‘Hey, let’s do a cookout,’ or ‘Let’s go take a salsa class together,’” Deaton said. “That’s where the dynamic shifts and people change to actually bonding at a real friendship level.”
“Everyone needs community,” he said, “[and] that’s how you will get better. It’s about the consistency of showing up and plugging in, wherever that [is].”
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