Success is about more than material things for Jarryd Simmons — it’s about family and contributing to the community.

The 17-year-old senior student at Impact Mentoring Academy was one of more than ten students who shared motivational poems and speeches at the Spoken Word event on March 4.

“I could have done a poem but I wanted to do a speech because I like having the freedom to speak and use my voice to influence others,” Jarryd, of St George’s, told The Royal Gazette.

“Everyone always speaks about success and being rich, so my speech was about how it’s not just about that but it’s actually about being successful in life.

“Most people would see success as having money, cars, houses, planes. But I see success as in you’re a successful person, you have a loving family and all good things around you.”

He said the event went really well and he believes the audience enjoyed the speech more than he did.

“At the end of my speech, a few of them started telling me how they say the exact same thing about being successful, and that I helped encourage and motivate them.

“In the end, I’m just glad that my message got through the way I had planned it.

“It doesn’t hurt doing a little good for somebody other than yourself. I hope that they would see that they are all successful in their own way.”

He added that he was proud to see some of his friends step outside of their comfort zone and present.

Jarryd has been a student at IMA for four years and said it had been “one of the best experiences of my life”.

“Every other school just focuses on education but here you focus on becoming a man and more about developing a person as themselves rather than just academic things.”

Funds raised through the Spoken Word event will help send a group of IMA students to volunteer with Bermudian charity Feed My Lambs Ministry in Haiti. Jarryd hopes to be among the group — he went two years ago and said the experience “was really life-changing” — but he is not sure if he will be able to.

“Right now I’m planning on going to Sheridan College, which is in Canada, so I can continue my further education in cybersecurity. I have something that’s supposed to be coming up for my cybersecurity so I don’t know if that is going to interfere with me being overseas.”

Jarryd developed an interest in cybersecurity after he and his friend started experimenting with a computer he had built.

“I started learning more and more about computers and networking and things like that and then after that it just stuck.

“We live in a generation where everyone is using technology and so everybody needs to be secure.”

But he said there are people who use it for the wrong reasons and he wants to “help make sure that doesn’t happen”.