Leadership Pays Off at Arts Center

While he didn’t win the $100,000 grand prize as America’s best young leader at an awards ceremony Tuesday in New York City, Dennis Lluy, director of the Koo’s Cafe youth arts center in Santa Ana, does have big plans for the $10,000 he’ll reap as one of 10 finalists.

“We’re not foreseeing we’re going to win the $100,000,” Lluy had said before leaving for New York to attend the Brick Award ceremony, sponsored by Do Something, a nonprofit organization that aims to seed the nation with community activists age 30 and under.

Consequently, the nonprofit Koo’s already has a plan for the $10,000 consolation prize. When the check comes next month, Lluy, 25, and three others will use the money to support themselves for three months while using their time to apply for additional grants.

Until now, Koo’s has been funded exclusively by proceeds from the all-ages rock concerts it hosts. The venue is an old house at 1505 N. Main Street that was once a Chinese restaurant. Bands set up in a front room that has no stage.

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Koo’s aim is to draw young rock fans through the door and get them interested in other offerings, such as art showings, poetry readings and a hip-hop dance troupe, Seventeenth Parallel, that performs locally.

“We’ll continue writing grant [applications] because the first one was so successful,” said Lluy, whose Brick Award application last May was his first effort at reeling in grant money. Having been cited as a Brick Award finalist should help Koo’s as it proceeds in the world of nonprofit fund-raising, Lluy said.

Rafe Bemporad, a spokesman for Do Something, said Wednesday that the top Brick Award went to Mark Levine-Suarez, the 29-year-old director of Credit Where Credit Is Due Inc., a neighborhood credit union that funnels loans to low-income immigrant families in the Washington Heights district of New York City.

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Betsy Apple, one of the judging panelists for the Brick Awards, said at the time of Lluy’s nomination last August that the shy, low-keyed activist had stood out for leading quietly by example.

She said that Koo’s use of rock music as an initial draw was “a clever use of a medium young people are attracted to. They’re drawn in the door because of the music, but they find much more.”

Lluy hopes that by the second half of 1999, Koo’s, which operates at night, will also open during the day. Besides generating revenue, he said, operating a nonprofit cafe will afford jobs and work experience for some of the young people who now volunteer.