Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan's Second Wave's On the Ground Kalamazoo series.

KALAMAZOO, MI — Everyone has problems. Everyone struggles.
 
Finding a perspective on tough times that allows you to make positives out of the negatives helps a lot. And sharing the insights that result from that may even be better.
 
So Kalamazoo-based Speak It Forward continues to use poetry, spoken-word performances, storytelling, and other means to inspire people to explore their experiences and share them with others.
 
Students prepare to perform at Fennville High School at the end of a semester-long Speak It Forward workshop.“There is a lot of vulnerability in our stories, and I think it resonates with a lot of people,” Gabriel Giron says of the often raw and painful human experiences he and his colleagues at Speak It Forward share. “It helps them know that there are people who have been through really difficult things and came out better for it.”
 
To celebrate its 16th year and to honor its late co-founder, Speak It Forward will host The Kirk Latimer Celebration of Success at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, May 7, 2025, at Chenery Auditorium. The event is intended to be a platform for young people to be “seen, heard, and celebrated,” says Giron, who is executive director of Speak It Forward.
 
Kinetic Affect, including Gabriel Giron, left, and the late Kirk Latimer, on stage, is shown performing at Western Michigan University.“Throughout the evening, the audience will experience a mix of spoken-word poetry, hip-hop, storytelling, and a kind of students’ transformation that they’re sharing on stage,” Giron says.
 
The occasion will also be a restart for the organization’s Celebrations of Success events, which have been waylaid since the COVID-10 pandemic surfaced in 2020.
 
The event will feature young people who are learning to write and express themselves in school-based Speak It Forward workshops. The event will give them the chance to share original pieces of writing that they’ve been working on, “many of them for the first time ever standing on a stage,” Giron says.
 
“The mentoring is dope. I love doing that,” Ed Genesis, a Kalamazoo rapper, says of working with young people. “But giving the youth an opportunity to hit the stage? And the community gets a chance to see them? That’s powerful. That’s powerful in a way that I can’t even explain.”
 
Ed Genesis, of Speak It Forward, talks about the power of storytelling during a post-performance breakout session at Kentwood High School in April of 2024.Genesis, who is co-director of Speak It Forward and its community engagement director, says it’s great to watch the other students acknowledge the young performers and to have teachers acknowledge them. Above all else, he says he wants young people to find their voice and to learn to speak up.
 
“Sometimes even adults have to struggle to find their voices, often times later on in life,” Genesis says. “When you can find that voice and can articulate that sentence, can convey that message, there’s a power within that.”
 
Genesis, a rapper, emcee, and community member who has been with Speak It Forward for about eight years, will also perform. His messages draw from his struggles growing up without a father in a family impacted by drug abuse.
 
The Kirk Latimer Celebration of Success event, hosted on May 9, 2025 by Speak It Foward, is named in honor of late co-founder Latimer, left, and Gabriel Giron, who continues as executive director of the nonprofit.Also performing will be Kinetic Affect, a spoken-word and performance art duo that includes Giron and Credell “Pete” Kitchen. They use knowledge gleaned from personal experiences to help motivate, inspire, educate, and uplift others, sift through traumatic and tragic situations to find character-building fodder.
 
Since its start in 2009 with Giron and Latimer, Kinetic Affect has become a nationally recognized edu-tainment resource, appearing everywhere from big business conferences, Fortune 500 company gatherings, and TEDx seminars, to prison wards, school classrooms, and even the Apollo Theater.
 
The Speak It Forward Celebration of Success event in 2019 included these 12- to 19-year-old students from the organization’s workshops.Giron struggled with hardships as he grew up, most notably overcoming Stage 3 testicular cancer as a young adult. But he says learning to overcome that was one of the best things that ever happened to him “because it helped me remember what was really important in life,” he says.
 
What was that?
 
“The message is that it is often the moments where we feel like we’re at our lowest or that we’re struggling — that can be a catalyst for positive change,” Giron says. “And the audiences that we speak to, whether it’s a Fortune 500 company or a high school or a prison, almost everybody has been through some level of difficulty in their own right, and I think it’s easy to feel like we are alone or people don’t understand.”
 
Giron was diagnosed with cancer in March of 2001 at age 18 when he was serving in the U.S. Army. After being treated for many months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., he was given a clean bill of health at age 20.
 
Among other things, his late friend Kirk Latimer, who co-founded Speak It Forward, told audiences about his struggles as a youth and dealing with the loss of five friends to suicide during his senior year of high school.  Latimer was a native of Detroit who attended Western Michigan University, earned an undergraduate degree in English Education there, and became an educator at Portage Northern High School. He died following a brief illness in September of 2020.
 
Credell “Pete” Kitchen is part of the performance art duo Kinetic Affect.As a spoken-word performer, Pete Kitchen talks about channeling the pain from growing up in an abusive household into learning martial arts. That evolved into him becoming a personal trainer and mindset coach. That further evolved into him becoming executive director of Counterpunch Academy, a nonprofit company dedicated to helping underserved youth transform their lives.
 
But introducing different perspectives on significant challenges is what Kinetic Affect tries to do.
 
“I think I had every right to be pissed off that I had cancer at 18 years old and suffered through that,” Giron says. “I could have stayed in that mentality. I think there’s a lot of people who go through these things, and they’re angry or upset, and it’s absolutely their right to be. But sometimes, hearing another perspective can help shift something.”
 
Speak It Forward does that for young people by visiting classrooms (usually as part of a writing or English curriculum from grade 7 and older) and tries to help students use their voices to reclaim the power that can be lost in the wake of difficult situations.
 
Of the young people who will participate in the Celebration of Success, Giron says,
“This event is not about being polished or perfect.” The young performers should be applauded because they are part of a generation that increasingly uses electronics to communicate rather than talking face-to-face, he says. Some of those who will participate are very reserved and hardly spoke at all when they started in the organization’s workshops.
 
The Speak It Forward Celebration of Success event in 2019 included these 12- to 19-year-old students from the organization’s workshops.Genesis says, “I think that the most dynamic aspect is that the community gets to see not only the work that we’ve been doing with them … but bigger than that is the real impact in them being able to have that opportunity to present to the community. I think that’s powerful.”
 
What is the outcome the organization hopes to see?
 
“I want the community to genuinely connect,” Giron says. “I love the fact that after all of the other celebrations that we’ve done, people don’t want to leave. They want to stay. They want to talk to each other. They want to hang around. There is something palpable in the air that they want to stay connected to. And I want people to feel that. And I want the kids, more than anything, to have a cathartic experience.”