Larry “Coop” D. Veal, Award -Winning Comedian and Humanitarian, Is a 1989 Paine College graduate. It was at Paine where he first started performing comedy for his Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. From there he started performing for every fraternity and sorority on campus. This enabled him to win The College “Bill Cosby Best Comedian Award” for three years straight.
In addition to being funny, he was also a passionate Humanitarian. The student body appointed him President of the college’s NAACP chapter, Editor of the Newspaper and First Vice President of the Student Government Association. During his final year he spearheaded the school “March Against Apartheid,”
The year he graduated, America experienced one of the country’s most controversial racial incidents since the Civil Rights era, New York’s Central Park Five. This affected Veal, a Sociology-Criminology Major immensely.
So much so that he developed a company that enabled him to travel the country advocating for programs and services to teach crime prevention strategies.
His work caught the attention of Former President Jimmy Carter.
Mr. Carter assisted Veal with partnering with some of the top National Youth Prevention Agencies in the country, such as Communities In Schools, the National Youth Crime Prevention Center, and the National Police Athletic League.
In 2005 his company Be More Positive Inc, set out to start a Community-Based Mentoring Initiative in Georgia’s largest school system Gwinnett County. The goal was to help train and engage community members to get involved with schools to teach students how to curb violence, and other behaviors that led to suspensions and expulsions. The motto was “Before you kick them out, let us help them out.”
In 2009, he officially convinced the Superintendent’s Office of Discipline and Instruction to embrace the idea and partner with him. Soon the school system not only had a mentoring program, but they had transitioned it to the county’s first Community-Based Mentoring Department.
In closing, Veal was able to do this while moonlighting as a stand-up comedian where he combines his love of humor with humanitarianism.
In 2021 he introduced his latest national Comedic/humanitarian show to help curb Gun-Violence, entitled, “Laugh Don’t Shoot.”