It was one of those ideas people said they would never pull off. "They" usually just meant Ivan, Ivan Suvanjieff, an artist/punk rocker/writer who once worked at the Rocky Mountain News (as, God help us, a society writer) for 87 days before getting canned.

Suvanjieff says his father once told him he was like an engine with no chassis or wheels. "I had a lot of ideas, but no way to get them down the highway."

He met Dawn Gifford Engle at Naropa University in Boulder in the early '90s. It was not the most promising of beginnings. He, playing the swaggering dandy, had her pegged as a "goony, rich Boulder do-gooder." He was certain she secretly adored him until she said he reminded her of all the jerks she went to school with in Detroit.

"I am from Detroit," Suvanjieff replied.

The rest, as they say, is history. Engle, too, was from Detroit. Both of their fathers were auto factory workers.

The idea was his. He was living in an unheated loft in north Denver where he tried to establish rapport with the neighborhood homies to whom he was known as vato loco, the crazy dude. It was 1994, the year after the spate of gang shootings known as the summer of violence. Suvanjieff ended up talking to some of the young men one day about Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. The conversation got him thinking.

Imagine how Tutu and other Peace Prize laureates could inspire and teach young people like these teens, who seemed so lost. What if he could bring them together? He talked to Engle, who had Washington connections - she once worked for former Republican U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp - and who'd also been a lobbyist for Tibet and had met the Dalai Lama.

"The Dalai Lama doesn't talk on the phone," Engle says, so she called his chief of staff. We have this great idea, she said. The Dalai Lama agreed to see them.

"I had $1.76 in the bank," Suvanjieff says. "So we had to borrow money to go to India. I'd tell people, 'The Dalai Lama has invited us.' And they'd be, 'Yeah, oh sure he did.' "

They made the trip in May 1995. "The Dalai Lama looked into my eyes," Suvanjieff said. "He said, 'You're not a Buddhist, are you?' 'No,' I said. He said, 'But you're not crazy, either.' "

PeaceJam was unofficially born. In the following months, the Dalai Lama's endorsement opened door after door. In 1996, the PeaceJam Foundation, a nonprofit, was established. Betty Williams, 1976 Nobel peace laureate, led their inaugural youth conference at Regis University.

"Do you have any idea what you are getting into?" Suvanjieff remembers Williams asking when they enlisted her in 1995. "I said, 'Sure we do,' " Suvanjieff said. "She just shook her head like, 'You are so dumb.' "

In the past 11 years, PeaceJam has conducted 150 youth congresses with Nobel laureates and launched 310,000 projects. Last year, PeaceJam held the largest-ever gathering of Nobel peace laureates and launched the Global Call to Action, a list of what the laureates believe are the 10 biggest obstacles to world peace.

By the end of this year, youth in nine countries, including this one, will have finished service projects addressing human rights, disease and access to clean water, among others. The PeaceJam Foundation hopes to inspire 1 billion acts of service by 2016. Peace, the now-married founders like to say, takes work.

It is this last effort that will bring the couple to the west steps of the state Capitol at 10:30 this morning, where Gov. Bill Ritter is expected to announce that Suvanjieff, Engle and their PeaceJam Foundation have been nominated for a 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. While the names of nominees are usually kept sealed for 50 years, Mairead Corrigan Maguire - 1976 laureate along with Williams - is making her letter of nomination public Thursday. Several other laureates working with PeaceJam are submitting concurring nominations, Engle says.

"It's just crazy that it's turned out to be successful," Engle says.

"What do you mean successful?" Suvanjieff says. "We're broke."

"We're a nonprofit," she says.

She goes on: "We're nothing extraordinary. We're really just two, average -"

"Flawed," Suvanjieff says.

"-flawed people," Engle finishes. "But, we were just really fired up by this idea, and we went with it. We just jumped off a cliff. I don't know. It captured our souls."

About 200 to 300 people are nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize every year, so Suvanjieff says, "I figure we have as much chance of winning as I do of winning MVP of the World Series. But it is incredibly humbling to be nominated, and I don't care that that is a cliché. I'm humbled. I'm something more than humbled."

"Look at me," he says, pointing to his chest, cigarette in his hand. "I'm so wrong."Yes, Suvanjieff is a chain-smoking, wise-cracking, nonstop idea machine given to inspired bouts of cursing, but I give him and Engle credit for doing a lot more than pay lip service to youth.

So, yes, I tell them, it's inspiring that you managed to persuade so many Nobel laureates to meet with youth, but it's also inspiring that you believed so much in what young people can do that you were willing to try to bring the world to them.

They tell me: People believed in us when we were young.

Then they say something I have known to be true: Scratch the surface of even the most skeptical kid and, as Engle puts it, "their hearts and souls are right there. They want so badly to connect with something that is real; they want to belong; they want people to care about them. They have goodness in them. They have greatness in them. The transformation that can happen is magic."

One of those gang-banging toughs Suvanjieff tried to engage in 1994? His name is Rudy Balles. He is now director of PeaceJam's gang prevention program.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

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