Ben Sooy, a Lafayette-based singer-songwriter and frontman of the band A Place for Owls, launched the nonprofit Holy Fool in 2025 to help support local musicians.
Ben Sooy is a believer. In music, in community, in the power of one person’s passion to start a revolution.
Long ago, he says, a sage counseled a student who was tired of going through the motions. The young man wanted to know how to do more, feel more, and ultimately change the world.
“And the older guru says, ‘Why don't you become all flame?’”
The moral, Sooy explains, is “figuring out a way to feel vibrantly alive” — so alive that your zest becomes unquenchable and spreads, like wildfire, to others.
There are similar stories across “all religious traditions,” Sooy says, including Buddhism and ancient Christianity. There are traces of both in Sooy’s impassioned ideas about society, community and creating art, and in his delivery, too: He speaks with the fervor of a Southern Baptist preacher, tempered by the compassion of a Tibetan monk.
“I'm an evangelist,” Sooy says, “but it's like mutual aid and making music.”
If Sooy is a missionary, then Holy Fool is his Protestant Reformation. Much like Martin Luther challenged the idea that common people needed priests to commune with God, Sooy believes musicians can cut out the middle man and learn to help one another.
The nonprofit’s mission is to create a network of artists who can lend and leverage the skills, experience and resources of their peers — though microloans, peer coaching and a lending library of gear and equipment — to help working musicians achieve, if not salvation, then at least artistic, and perhaps financial, satisfaction.
“There's less and less money to be made in music,” Sooy, 40, says. “Bands and songwriters sign record deals or hire a manager, and then they end up giving between 50% and 80% of all their royalties away.”
“You don't need to hire a manager or sign a record deal. Can we essentially, through community, share the load?”
Holy Fool was founded and formalized as a 501c3 organization last year. The nonprofit operates as “two simultaneous systems,” Sooy says: the “informal work that already happens in a healthy music scene” — advice, gear share, networking — and the more formal work of soliciting donors and administering monetary aid.
Help comes in two forms: microloans and house shows. Holy Fool pays each artist $500 to play a venue, an unheard of amount in today’s climate of $50 to $150 payouts.
That is “far and away more than you would see at any other type of gig,” says Darren Thornberry, who played the inaugural Holy Fool show in November at Front Porch Coffee in Lakewood.
Thornberry typically performs with his six-piece folk rock outfit Mercy Club. It’s not uncommon for the band to split $90 after a show — “gas and burrito money,” Thornberry says.
Such meager earnings make it hard to build any savings for emergencies or big projects. Right now, Mercy Club is fundraising to record a single and music video in Denver. Total estimated cost? $800, of which the band paid $350 in advance.
“Could we all dig deep into our tiny pockets and come out with the $450? It wouldn’t be pretty,” Thornberry says.
It is the kind of project Holy Fool could cover in the future through a microloan. The board is finalizing an application process; an open call for aid is planned for the end of March.
Loans could be for things like equipment or recording, gas money for touring or unexpected costs: “Somebody needs a couple hundred bucks to fix a broken amplifier,” Sooy says, “or your tour van broke down in the middle of Wichita and you need a little bit of help.”
Holy Fool is a tight-knit group. The leadership team are all volunteers; like many musicians, they each have multiple jobs to support their creative work. Most of the nonprofit’s benefactors and recipients are within their existing social networks.
Sooy sees a lot of opportunity for greater cohesion in the communities he’s already part of: DIY punk and emo, singer-songwriters and home recording/emerging music producers.
“We have fragmented music scenes in the Front Range [that] I think would benefit from feeling more connected,” he says. “Capitalism teaches us to view everybody that's doing the same thing as you as competition to be destroyed, not a friend and a collaborator or someone that could actually bolster you up. There's technical skills we can share. There's also marketing and promotional skills we can share.”
That spirit of cooperation is what hooked Elle Tyler. After being “a super small” monthly donor, Tyler gave a portion of the proceeds from the sale of her Colorado home to Holy Fool after a move to Indianapolis.
“I’m really excited about what they're doing,” she says. “Mentorship, connections, a financial piece to support musicians — that absolutely resonated with me.”
Thornberry, who also donates monthly to Holy Fool, thinks about what will be lost if more and more independent artists get priced out of creating music.
“If you take too many local bands away, the national acts may drift away from our scene, because they just aren’t filling venues without the support of local bands,” he says. “We’re supporting the venue, the people who have jobs to work that night. There is a lot of local money going through the till. There’s a heck of a lot more fully local shows than national shows.”
On a spiritual level, losing a creative outlet “would hurt our own soul and psyche,” Thornberry says. “Artists have a need to create.”
Holy Fool is balm for Sooy’s soul as well. He works part-time as the music director at a Lafayette church, and part-time teaching at a music school in Broomfield. Running the nonprofit along with making time for his own band, A Place for Owls, has enabled him to structure nearly his entire life around the art form he loves — even if it means a busier schedule and less money in the bank.
“If I'm essentially taking a vow of poverty to do music and catalyze music, what's the most wholehearted, whole-ass way to do that?” Sooy says. “It would feel like a denial of my truest self to go and work a day job that made me 20,000 more dollars per year or whatever. And really, is that gonna make my life better? More importantly, is that gonna make my community better?”
“If we can inspire more and more community-oriented people and more and more generosity-oriented people to formalize a lot of the work they're doing, be compassionate and open hearted, that's a win.”
ON THE BILL: Holy Fool house show with Joel Ansett, Kevin Schlereth and Laura Anne Reitzel. 6:30 p.m. (potluck) 7:30 p.m. (music) Thursday, March 26, 3554 Marion St., Denver. Free
