Landon Dais is getting “his groove back” after an unsuccessful primary campaign for City Council that left him broke, 20 pounds lighter, and exhausted from 16-hour days. Although he lost to District 9 incumbent Inez E. Dickens, he has not lost enthusiasm for politics.

“I found my niche,” he said. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life for something.”

Now, he plans to launch a non profit organization, Uptown Residents Who Care, to groom young professionals to become civic leaders. Last month, in his basement apartment, he huddled with five friends over homemade chicken soup and laptops and began charting a plan of action.

But that plan won’t debut until 2011, after Dais finishes a year in Miami as a field campaign manager for Rudy Moise, a Democratic congressional candidate.

Dais acknowledges he may face challenges – either as the head of a non profit, a community organizer or as a campaign manager – because of his age. He believes that shouldn’t stop him from trying.

“Martin Luther King did the Selma walk at age 26,” Dais said. “So I’m already behind the ball; I’m 28.”

Son of a prominent Harlem community leader, Dais lit up the campaign trail for Barack Obama as president of the Uptown Democrats, a grass roots organization. While campaigning for Obama, he also starred as the resident politician on “Harlem Heights,” Black Entertainment Television’s reality series profiling New York’s young black elite. After the presidential election, Dais announced his own city council candidacy on the show.

But Dais and other uptown candidates faced extremely low voter turnout. In New York County, although there are more than 600,000 registered active Democrats, only 12,695 cast votes in the 9th District primaries, NY Board of Elections records show. Dais received just 2,648 votes.

“It’s still a victory,“ he said despite feeling disappointed. He feels he earned the respect of an established local officeholder.

Dickens and her supporters did not expect his campaign “to think outside the box,” said Dais. “They didn’t realize that we were the Obama generation that helped our president get elected.”

Dais and other young black professionals like Corey Blay, his campaign manager, don’t necessarily aspire to be Obama. But they’re inspired by the grassroots mobilization that helped elect him, Blay says.

“The majority of us cut our teeth on the Obama campaign,” Blay said. “And so we knew how to work. We knew how to organize.”

Brian Benjamin, founder of Young Professionals for Change, also started his grassroots organization in May 2008 to campaign for President Obama. He’d thrown big parties before, but didn’t expect more than 600 people to turn out for his fundraiser that helped raise $42,000.

Now, a year after the election, Benjamin’s organization still boasts an email listserv of more than 4,000 young professionals of color in the tri-state area.

Although enthusiasm for political change has tapered since President Obama’s inauguration, Benjamin, who’s 32 and a fundraising consultant, still sees an emerging generation of young people involved in their communities.

But he noted, “A lot of the excitement and engagement was because of the president and not the movement itself. When you take the president out, it just becomes more complicated.”

So, instead of large fundraisers, Benjamin set up a small town hall meeting for 200 people at Abyssinian Baptist Church last month, with the help of YP4C’s local initiative Organizing for Harlem. Participants learned  more about national issues through Organizing for America, a grassroots organization promoting President Obama’s national agenda.

He’s also hosted brunches where speakers addressed groups of 30 about civic concerns. “President or no president, people like to eat,” Benjamin said. “That’s not going to change.”

Though the 2008 campaign helped energize urban communities, he said, now grassroots organizations like YP4C have to continue working to that “keep this core group engaged.”