(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

It started long before we knew the outcome of the election. Bejidé Davis just wanted to say “Thanks Obama,” without a hint of irony or sarcasm. Now Davis and Amanda Washington Lockett are planning an event in D.C. to show gratitude for President Barack Obama on his last day in office that tens of thousands of people say they plan to attend.

“I really think that he is the face of making the impossible possible,” says Davis, a corporate attorney who lives in New York. “A lot of people said the economy couldn’t be fixed, he fixed it. People said Osama bin Laden couldn’t be caught, he caught him. A lot of people said there couldn’t be an African American president, he did it. He keeps breaking barriers.”

Those were the kinds of things that Davis was talking about with her older brother a few months ago, wishing she could express her deeply felt gratitude with a round of applause. “My brother said ‘Are you seriously saying you want to give the president of the United States a clap out?'”

The idea percolated in Davis’ head for a few weeks until she watched Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. Inspired by his message, she created a Facebook event thinking that, at most, a handful of her friends would join in. It asked: “Who wants to come with me to D.C. in January and stand at the White House gate and just clap for the President on his last day of work?”

When Davis woke up the next day, there were already 500 positive RSVPs. So she enlisted Lockett, her college roommate at Spelman College, to make it a reality.

The event takes its name from a meme that began with sarcasm—disgruntled conservatives “thanking” Obama for things like the BP oil spill and the national debt—and ended with irony—with the president’s supporters employing the phrase to mock those who blame Obama for a wide range of problems.

But Davis and Lockett are as sincere and determined as it gets.

“I was a teacher in Washington, D.C. in a predominantly African American middle school and it was amazing to see some of these students re-actualize [in response to the] president. The climate of being in Washington, D.C. while Obama was president was awe-inspiring,” says Lockett, who is now a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. “He inspired change and continues to inspire change in young people, in how they can see themselves in positions of leadership in this country and in their community.”

After the election, with much of Obama’s legacy hanging in the balance, even more people signed on to the Facebook event. RSVPS “increased tremendously, almost exponentially,” Davis says. “It is more important than ever.” Meanwhile, a few dozen people did something similar for the vice president last week, holding a “Thank You, Uncle Joe” rally outside the Naval Observatory.

While the ‘Thanks Obama’ team originally planned to just show up on Pennsylvania Avenue and clap on January 19, Davis and Lockett have had to give much more serious consideration to logistics. Like the women who ran into an unexpectedly huge swell of interest while organizing a Women’s March on Washington, Davis and Lockett are pivoting their plans.

They’re working on finding an indoor or covered space to keep people the 40,000 people who say they want to come (and another 120,000 who say they are “interested”) warm and safe, though the possibility remains that it will take place outdoors. In the event that they keep it outside, Davis says they are already talking to the National Park Service about getting a permit. They’ve worked up a website where attendees can sign up for more information. And the pair is looking into the possibility of having companies sponsor the event, or potentially funding it through a crowdfunding campaign.

Davis says she is drawing on some experience organizing events in college and a “strong team” behind them to plan the event. She acknowledges that it a “lot to bite off” but remains positive that it will happen in one form or another.

“Spelman women, we make ‘a choice to change the world,'” Davis says, quoting her alma mater’s motto. “We’re very committed to that.”