Alumni Excellence Award Recipient: Luke Kues ’25

As a kid growing up in northern Kentucky, community service wasn’t optional for Luke Kues ’25. It was expected. At 12, he joined his mother in Uganda to help build classrooms and establish health clinics in the central African nation. 

“In my family, we were constantly thinking about others, and ways we could serve,” he says. “I found different opportunities to contribute to the community. As a freshman in high school, I started a landscaping company that allowed people to enjoy their yard again. I liked service.” 

Today, that passion continues. In 2020, Kues launched True Community, an organization that, in partnership with the American Red Cross, provides first aid and CPR certification, and training in the use of automated external defibrillators (AED), in 20 American cities, and in Ghana, Africa. 

True Community’s logo is a tree, a nod to Kues’ early landscaping days. A tree’s health is dependent on its roots, he notes. “When one tree thrives, it supports the surrounding trees,” Kues adds. “Our vision is a wellness revolution, starting with something as simple as teaching first aid, and then integrating broader wellness services into the community.” 

Those services include physical, social, financial, mental, emotional and spiritual development instruction. The pillars guide True Community’s programming, including Wellness Wednesdays, events that address chronic disease and mental health. 

To date, the organization has worked with 21,000 residents in cities that include Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and elsewhere on the East Coast, and in the Midwest and the South. Many participants live in marginalized communities with disproportionate rates of obesity, diabetes and hypertension. 

Kues got the idea for True Community as an undergraduate at Northern Kentucky University, where he became deeply involved with the NAACP and the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, both of which stress service and advocacy. 

It was at Maryland that, with an Accelerator Fellowship, he worked with the Do Good Institute to refine the organization’s strategy. 

Kues, who earned a Master’s of Public Health degree at Maryland, estimates that True Community has helped to save 1,250 lives since its inception. Efforts are aimed at “community responders": everyday people who include family members and neighbors – those who are mostly likely to be nearby in an emergency. 

“The first person on the scene is almost never a medical professional,” says Kues, who is True Community’s Executive Director. “It’s someone who happens to be there.” 

True Community works with civil rights groups, fraternities and sororities, and grassroots organizations to publicize its efforts. It promotes its Lifesaving Legacies Program during Black History Month. There are plans this year to expand to Nigeria as well as to the Caribbean nation of Grenada. 

Unlike many nonprofits, True Community was designed with sustainability in mind. While the organization does receive grants and donations, those funds make up only a fraction of its budget. 

Instead, True Community generates revenue by offering at-cost CPR and first aid certifications to individuals and companies that require them. That income – more than $500,000 last year, with projections nearing $750,000 this year – funds free community programming and expansion plans. 

“Too many great organizations struggle because of funding,” Kues says. “We wanted to solve that problem early.”