Sandra Leyva

Director of la Lucha Space passionate about community

Sandra Leyva, 28, sits at The Locals, a marketplace for Arkansas producers and a meeting place in downtown Conway. Leyva and her husband founded la Lucha Space, described on its Facebook page as a “community space that cultivates creativity and collaboration,” in their home when they moved to Conway. La Lucha Space is now part of The Locals.
Sandra Leyva, 28, sits at The Locals, a marketplace for Arkansas producers and a meeting place in downtown Conway. Leyva and her husband founded la Lucha Space, described on its Facebook page as a “community space that cultivates creativity and collaboration,” in their home when they moved to Conway. La Lucha Space is now part of The Locals.

Sandra Leyva and her husband, Shawn Goicoechea, slept on strangers’ couches all over the world before they found their home in Conway.

The couple, co-founders of the nonprofit organization la Lucha Space, both graduated in 2008 with degrees in comparative history of ideas from the University of Washington in Seattle. Her degree emphasis is on social justice and community development.

“My then-boyfriend, now husband, Shawn, and I decided to take a trip to different places after we graduated. That was between nine and 10 months that we didn’t sleep in the same place more than a week at a time,” she said. “We went all over the world and did aid work in different places, or worked at an organic farm.”

Leyva, a native of Mexico, and her family moved to Texas when she was 5 years old, then to Washington when she was in the 11th grade. She said her parents, “at their core,” are scientists.

She said her idea going into college was to get a degree in business, but the courses that caught her eye were sociology, anthropology and philosophy. Leyva said she “stumbled into” the degree. “Nowadays, it’s called social entrepreneurship,” she said.

That major had the most study-abroad opportunities, she said, and through the program, she traveled to Brazil, Cyprus and Guatemala.

When she and Shawn graduated, they applied to graduate schools, packed their bags and went to a “couch-surfing” website to find places to stay as they traveled the globe.

“We had experiences that kind of let you see what the world was like. For us, it was very important to put all that theory we learned in school into practice.”

Sleeping on strangers’ couches didn’t bother her.

“I was maybe sometimes tired, and you get overwhelmed if too many little things go wrong, but never afraid for my safety in any way,” she said.

“When we were in Mexico, we had plenty of family to couch-surf in that network,” Leyva said, laughing.

The couple applied to graduate schools as they traveled. They were accepted into the global-studies program at the University of California-Santa Barbara, but they decided not to go.

“We felt like we wanted some experience in real hands-on work, so we decided, OK, we want a little coffee-shop community space,” she said. “We kind of dreamed this dream up where we would have this two-story house and live upstairs and have the community space downstairs, and we were in Lebanon when we started looking at places. We had the Internet.”

They’d been in Lebanon about a month, where they worked on an organic farm.

“It was called an eco village, which had eco tourism and people like us who come in and work there in exchange for food and lodging.”

They discovered by searching online that California was too expensive, but Arkansas had a good cost of living.

“We flew from Beirut to Little Rock. I’d never been in Arkansas before,” she said. Neither had Shawn.

In Little Rock, they slept on the couch of Dan Allen, whose mother, Nancy Allen, lives in Conway and works at the Faulkner County Library. Dan Allen had graduated from the same university as Leyva and her husband, and also had a comparative history of ideas degree.

In Conway, they found the home they’d imagined.

“We found this house at the corner of Prince and Donaghey — it was a two-story house pretty close to the colleges,” she said.

“We felt that Conway was big enough, yet small enough, and [the coffee-shop-community space] wasn’t something here already. We thought that we could make a contribution and start something and hoped, with the student population, they would be receptive to the idea of alternative shared space.”

Leyva said they found out city zoning regulations wouldn’t let them open a conventional coffee shop in the residential area.

“At first, I flipped out, because this was the plan,” she said.

Shawn suggested “pay as you please,” a method he’d experienced when he traveled to New Zealand. That’s what they did.

Leyva would cook, and people would pay what they could. People met in their home to discuss projects and ideas.

La Lucha translates to “the struggle” in Spanish, she said.

“It has a lot of connotations about social justice, but also about the everyday grind and struggle to make a better world,” Leyva said.

“Very soon, we started getting involved with local farmers and farmers markets because we couldn’t just go buy stuff from Walmart and say we wanted to have a better community,” she said.

“We were lucky that Conway Locally Grown had started,” she said of an online farmers market.

La Lucha Space was the place where people had music shows, potlucks, workshops, “all in this idea that if you want to see something happen, you have to do it and make it happen,” she said.

“People who came were brave to knock on the door of this house and find out what it is,” she said.

“We got involved with other community projects like the Urban Farm Project and started collaborating with ArtsFest and even organized a workshop for immigrants who have come as children and who now were able to apply for a permit to work here.

“It’s really whatever; the community would bring us ideas, and we would help organize it.”

“La Lucha is the organization, and the only thing that changed is that my house is just my house because we moved to The Locals,” she said.

La Lucha Space has three programs, including The Locals, which opened in November at 1024 Van Ronkle St.

The Urban Farm Project is a community garden planted on the lawn north of the Faulkner County Library.

“We teach people how to grow food sustainably, and we have workdays, and volunteers are welcome to take produce.”

The third program that is coming to an end is Farmers Market Promotions.

Leyva, who worked at the Faulkner County Library from 2011 to 2013 and graduated in 2013 with a degree in nonprofit management from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, now works full time at The Locals. She is director of la Lucha Space.

“It’s going really well; it’s very different to have a public presence,” she said of la Lucha Space.

“It’s a community space, and it’s a marketplace of local products by small local producers in Arkansas. We have farmers who are food producers; artists and crafters and small community organizations that are nonprofit; and musicians and publishers — they are members of the space. In order to sell stuff from The Locals, you have to apply and pay a monthly fee, and we take 12 1/2 percent of every sale price,” she said.

The Locals also has “co-worker members,” people who share office space in the building.

“That’s how we pay the rent,” she said.

“It was our strategy for us to be able to not only distribute the administrative burden for all these people, but also the risk of opening a space,” she said.

Beth Norwood of Conway is program director of The Locals and praised what Leyva has brought to the place.

“Her personality is one thing that really probably brings a lot to The Locals,” Norwood said. “She has this happy, bubbly, loving personality that really brightens up the entire space. She’s so welcoming that I think people come into the space, and they feel like they belong there.

“Building the community is really one of the things both she and Shawn are very passionate about.”

The word community comes up often in a conversation with Leyva.

“We really want to see the space take off as a community center for people to meet there and have interest groups and get involved with community projects that are happening all around town,” she said.

Leyva said she wants people to come in to have a cup of Arkansas-roasted coffee, buy fresh eggs or a handcrafted product, or just experience the sense of community.

“We really, really want to cultivate a sense of place for younger students,” Leyva said.

“Our biggest problem is that kids graduate, and they leave because there’s nothing to keep them here, so we’re working very hard to keep them invested and involved in projects they think are cool so they’ll want to keep working in the community and stay here.

“I believe communities are the building blocks of the future. I don’t romanticize the past — we are in the era of the Internet. We are Internet children, so your community doesn’t have to be constrained by your physical location. … You can reach out to whatever community you self-define as being part of.”

Leyva said even though a person can be “the local

anywhere,” he can’t be “the local” in more than one place.

“We like to believe we are all co-producers; we are at the same time producing and consuming the place we are inhabiting,” she said.

“Wherever you are, you have the power to influence, to change, to have an impact on that place you are in,” she said. “We want to get students to realize you don’t have to go all across the world to make a difference; you can make a difference in the world right here, right now.”

Leyva said she and her husband ride their bicycles and eat fresh food to be healthy, but also to practice what they preach. Yes, they own a TV, but they don’t have cable.

“People ask me, ‘Oh, are you eco-friendly?’ I say, ‘Well, yeah, and you should be, too, because you live on this planet,’” she said.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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