A year ago, Kansas City magazine produced a special issue spotlighting 17 “super agers.” We dubbed this issue Nine Over 90, Eight Over 80, and it celebrated some of the city’s most remarkable citizens and the lasting contributions they’ve made to the metro over a lifetime. This year, we thought it would be just as fascinating to look in the other direction: toward the young up-and-comers already making their mark.
In this feature, we take a look at 20 Kansas City grade schoolers and high schoolers who are proving to themselves and others that they not only have found their niche at a startlingly young age but are also pushing forward, facing challenges head-on and bringing their dreams to fruition.
There is a gifted musician who some call a prodigy, a nationally ranked boxer who started off as a ballerina, an inventor with an app to help the visually impaired, an urban youth who turned the tragedy of his brother’s murder into the triumph of a new crime prevention tool, a national dance champion at age four and so many more. Here are their stories. Let’s cheer them on.
Anniston Reed
Stage actor, singer and dancer
Age 8
Eight-year-old actor, singer and dancer Anniston Reed is a firecracker of talent and energy, one of those young performers who glows from the inside out. Ask her what an average day looks like and she rattles it off with a cheerful matter-of-factness. “I woke up this morning and I had to go to school, then I had to go to piano practice, and then I had to rehearse,” she says.
For most second graders, that schedule alone would be impressive. But Anniston isn’t just “rehearsing” in grade school plays and taking myriad lessons. She’s a professional.
This past holiday season, Anniston stepped into the role of Tiny Tim in Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s A Christmas Carol, treating the demanding part with calm confidence. “It’s really fun,” she says. “It takes a long time, but it’s worth it. Once we get to the show and start running through it, it gets easier and better each time.”
Anniston’s career began at three, when she first stepped into a dance class. She won a national dance competition in 2021. “The trophy was bigger than her,” says her mother Whitney Reed. Anniston’s early success quickly opened the door to theater roles.
Her dance repertoire is impressively wide for a young performer: contemporary lyrical, jazz, musical theater, hip-hop, tap and ballet. She’s already appeared in 15 musicals, played the pivotal role of “Ivonka” in KC Rep’s Once, performed with the Kansas City Ballet in The Nutcracker, worked in print and commercial TV projects, and earned national dance titles in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
All this talent runs in the family. Anniston’s parents, Whitney and Jeff Reed, run the Reed Performing Arts Center, where Jeff directs and stages multiple musicals each year and Whitney leads the competitive dance program. Still, neither expected their daughter to leap into the spotlight quite so young.
Jeff recalls the moment he realized something extraordinary was happening. “We were headed to rehearsal when Anniston—she was about four—came downstairs and said she’d be coming to the show that day,” he says. “I thought, ‘Yeah, right. You’re four.’ But at rehearsal she went through all of our choreography, stepped into formations and just did the show. It was Oliver! I had no idea.”
Jeff is very honest with Anniston when working with her at the studio, and she expects nothing less, he says. “We talk about energy, volume, facial expressions. Exit and enter the stage in character. And she does awesome with these roles.”
In her most recent endeavor, she was presented with the challenge of portraying the disabled Tiny Tim character. “The director put a cough drop on the ball of my foot during rehearsal so I wouldn’t put pressure on it,” she says of learning how to believably hobble across the stage. “I was supposed to kind of hop on it. We practiced at home so I’d remember the technique.”
Her dad beams with pride. “She stays focused and determined,” Jeff says. “She believes she can do whatever she sets her mind to, and we’ll be right there to support her.”
Anniston’s dreams stretch as big as her talent. She wants to be an adult actor, a mom and a dance teacher—and someday, she hopes, a Broadway star.
Madeliene Pollard
Award-winning farmer
Age 18
Most of us don’t think much about where our food comes from and how it arrives on our neighborhood grocer’s shelves. But Mizzou freshman Madeliene Pollard does.
In 2025, Madeliene won the National Future Farmers of America Agriculture Proficiency Award for diversified crop production and entrepreneurship for two different types of crops—soybeans and corn. She was particularly noted for her knowledge in operating and caring for machinery, planting and harvesting crops, watching market trends and practicing efficient farming methods. “Being on stage for the award ceremony was very surreal,” she says. “And I think it reflected on all of the hard work that I had done throughout my whole FFA career, not just for this award.”
Madeliene grew up on a 2,000-acre family farm in Missouri, and in grade school, before she started FFA in high school, she participated in 4H. She and her family grew corn and soybeans. “I was actively involved in the farm with my dad and my grandpa (a retired agriculture teacher), so I really got to know agriculture,” she says. “It’s more than planting and harvesting. It’s about helping fix equipment, driving the grain carts and sweeping grain bins. It’s really turned into something that I’m very passionate about.”
Madeliene loves spreading her farming knowledge, especially to younger people, because she knows they’re the next generation of agriculturalists and the key to the country’s food future. “I want to not only leave an impact on them, but I also want to teach them as much as I can using my knowledge, what I did and what they can do to succeed in the way that they want to succeed.”
Reagan Kinney
Ballerina
Age 19
Most professional ballerinas start very early. The road to success can be physically and psychologically brutal.
Rising star ballerina Reagan Kinney knows the drill. Her ballet and dance career has been an exercise in total dedication, and now, at 19, a professional career is coming into sight.
Reagan began dancing at age three at Ballet Arizona in Phoenix. It wasn’t until she became a teen that she seriously thought she might make dance a career. “I don’t remember a time in my life where I wasn’t dancing,” she says. “Thirteen was when I first started [thinking about] pursuing a [ballet] career.”
Most of her training was done after school. “When I got to high school, I was doing half days at school and leaving early to go to dance in the afternoons.”
With the help of merit scholarships, Reagan attended Kansas City Ballet School’s Summer Intensive in both 2023 and 2024.
“I was dancing from 9 to 5 every day,” she says about the experience. “We got to do a bunch of different styles. It wasn’t just ballet. We would start in the morning with a ballet class, and then usually we’d follow that up with a pointe class, and then in the afternoons we would do other styles of dance.”
After completing the summer intensives, she made the leap and moved to Kansas City full-time, joining the ballet’s pre-professional daytime program as a trainee, dancing in The Nutcracker and Don Quixote at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.
Both experiences are seen as major stepping stones to becoming a professional dancer. “I know what it’s like to motivate yourself,” Reagan says. “Ballet is really demanding—sometimes it’s just getting your head in that space.”
Lindsay Rottinghaus
Gymnast
Age 16
Lindsay Rottinghaus is a born gymnast. “She used to flip around the house and we couldn’t stop her,” says her mom, Dena Rottinghaus, who was also a gymnast in her youth. “She would try to climb the door jams. When she was in first grade, I took her to a recreational gym in Olathe and told the coach that I thought she had some talent. That’s what started it all.”
Lindsay started training seriously at Eagles Gymnastics in Martin City when she was in the seventh grade.
Now a sophomore at Olathe North, Lindsay continues to train at Eagles Gymnastics, where she works with coach Janet Nash and has been able to move up from a Level 7 gymnast to a Level 10 in three years—an almost unheard of ascension in the world of youth gymnastics. “She was able to get through each of the first three levels in one year by qualifying for state regionals,” her mom says. In 2024, she was a Level 9 qualifier, finishing fifth on vault. “She qualified for Level 10 in 2025, which is the nationals, but did not place. You compete against everybody in the nation.”
When warming up at the USA Gymnastics Level 10 National Championships in Salt Lake City, Utah, tragedy struck, but it revealed Lindsay’s true competitive spirit. “I was warming up and I actually broke my ankle,” Lindsay says. “But I ended up competing on it because at the time we didn’t know it was broken. I had to be out for four weeks to heal. Toward the end, I was always at the gym doing whatever I could to get back.”
Lindsay hopes to compete in a Division One college. “To do that,” her mom says, “you almost have to be perfect.”
Oskar Ryan-Garrard
Guitarist, musician
Age 16
When he was just one year old, Oskcar Ryan-Garrard’s dad Paul Ryan bought him a guitar. Paul was a punk rock guitarist who passed away a year later. Did he know his son would be a musical prodigy? He just might have.
Oskar started taking guitar and piano lessons when he was five years old. By the time he was in the eighth grade, he was the lead guitarist for the Paseo Academy of Fine and Performing Arts. His music teacher at Paseo, Willie Thornton, told a KSHB reporter that Oskar was “exceptional” and had “absolute perfect pitch.” Thornton says that maybe one out of 10,000 people have perfect pitch and calls Oskar a prodigy and genius. “He’s going to be famous one day, there’s no doubt in my mind.”
When Oskar was in the seventh grade, he started playing in the high school jazz band, “which was insane,” Oskar says. “Normally it would be like juniors and seniors and the occasional sophomore and freshmen. Me, I was an anomaly.”
Oskar began his guitar journey listening to bands such as Green Day and Linkin Park. Who’s his favorite guitarist? “Honestly, it depends,” he says. “Kurt Cobain is one of the most influential guitar players of the ’90s. Jimi Hendrix is the most influential overall, in my opinion. For indie rock, it’s Stephen Malkmus (from indie band Pavement).”
Oskar started an indie rock band called East Bottling Company, but it broke up. “I shifted to plan B, which is Torn Pamphlet, which goes more into the emo (punk rock) subculture, post-hardcore,” he says. “What I’m doing for Mr. Thornton now is basically a mix of industrial grunge and shoegaze (a subgenre of indie and alternative rock).”
Oskar’s mom, Julia, says that he is really talented at jazz, “but he’s a 15-year-old punk rock kid.”
Once Oskar starts his professional career, he wants to have two music personalities. “I’m digging jazz musician,” but also, “I’m in the underground scene.”
Matthew Chen
Medical researcher
Age 17
Blue Valley North High School senior Matthew Chen isn’t waiting for adulthood to make an impact—he’s already carving out a name for himself as a young cancer researcher and national advocate. His mission is to improve treatment outcomes for cancer patients everywhere.
Matthew’s passion blends cutting-edge technology with human-centered care. Drawing on his self-taught AI skills and coding language abilities, he is developing predictive models designed to help doctors better understand patient outcomes, potential side effects and overall quality of life during cancer treatments.
One of his AI projects analyzes how a patient’s geographic location affects their ability to access and afford care—spotlighting the real-world inequities many families face. Another tracks lymphocytes, a key white blood cell, to help physicians tailor treatment plans throughout the course of care.
Matthew began his cancer research work in 2023, when he started volunteering with the University of Kansas Cancer Center, partnering with the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. “Through that work, I experienced firsthand the importance of educating people about cancer screening and early detection,” he says. “I met cancer survivors and caregivers and I heard their stories about navigating this terrible disease and its many side effects. I wanted to do more to help.”
That desire led him to reach out to other researchers and ultimately merge his interest in programming with oncology. He was listed as one of six authors in a national oncology publication article in April 2024 about patient navigation in cancer treatment. “It allowed me to realize that my interest in artificial intelligence had real-world applications,” he says.
In June, Matthew traveled to Washington, D.C., where he advocated for cancer research funding during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing featuring U.S. Senator Jerry Moran, who represents Kansas. Afterward, he spoke with Moran one-on-one. “I asked him to help protect cancer funding for this generation and all future generations,” Matthew says. Inspired by their discussion, Matthew wrote about the experience in an op-ed published in the Kansas City Star upon his return.
At home, Matthew’s father, professor Ron Chen, the chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, has had a front-row seat to his son’s growing talent. “Matthew clearly has always shown an interest and strength in science, technology, engineering and math areas,” Ron says. “When he got to high school, he really differentiated into being interested in computer science. He picked up programming languages very quickly. There was a lot of initiative on his part—finding online courses, learning Python (a high-level computer programming language) on his own and figuring out how to use it to build AI tools for cancer research.”
Matthew continues to volunteer with cancer advocacy organizations and is setting his sights on attending an Ivy League university to study chemistry and computer science. His long-term vision: becoming an oncologist dedicated to designing better treatments and mentoring the next generation of scientists. “I want to see what I can learn in those fields,” he says. “I want to make a difference in the world.”
Conrad Chase
Competitive cyclist
Age 14
Conrad Chase embarked on his first 50-mile cycling challenge when he was just eight years old (his parents surprised him with a new bike at the halfway mark). “It was interesting,” Conrad says. “I was very single-minded at the time. My dad told me I could do it, so we just started.”
Now, in his teens Conrad works out with the local cycling club, Move Up Cycling. He has competed in 73 races since 2017, and in 2018, he won all six of the races he competed in, including the Missouri State Cyclocross Championships in Raytown.
Last year, Conrad placed in the top 10 in 11 of the 21 races he competed in, according to Cross Results, a cycling race history website.
Conrad’s dad, Jason Chase, a cycling endurance coach, says his son started riding when he was just three years old. “I took him out to a little trail around Longview Lake, gave him the old push and ran alongside of him and, and he was off,” Jason says. “Man, I was so impressed that he was able to do that, being just three years old.”
Conrad explains his race strategy: “If I have a teammate, the first thing I do is try to get in the breakaway, which is a group off the front, or help position for the sprint and do the best I can.” Conrad does men’s races as well, his dad says. “He’ll do his juniors race earlier in the morning, and then later on in the day, he’ll race in the men’s category three, which is in the middle between experts and beginners.”
Jason says that his son also joins in with adult group rides. “We ride anywhere from 20 miles to 75 or sometimes even 100 miles, and he’s right there with us the whole time.”
Competing in cycling’s top race, the Tour de France, is Conrad’s eventual goal. “I would love to be doing competitive cycling as a profession,” he says.
Kaiden Johnson
Film actor
Age 12
Kaiden Johnson is a local film actor known for his supporting role as Ahmed, the son of Laura Cowan, in the Lifetime movie Girl in the Garage: The Laura Cowan Story, which was shot in Kansas City and premiered last year. According to Kaiden’s IMDB bio, he was also featured in a found-footage horror film about government mind control shot in 2025.
Kaiden says the role in the Lifetime movie was unexpected because he had tried out a month prior to learning he had landed the role and just assumed he hadn’t been picked. It was a surprise, he says. “I just didn’t know what to say at that point. It was a new experience. So I mostly just had to keep an open mind since it was something that I hadn’t done before.”
The film shot for three weeks in the summer and fall of 2024 in Overland Park, Raytown, the Crossroads and Smithville.
“I was very nervous that first day,” he says. “I had to cut my hair for the movie, and there was almost no hair on the back of my head. So that felt weird.”
Kaiden’s acting career began when he was just eight years old. He took acting classes from Next Paige Talent Agency. Kaiden’s mother, Ashley Johsnon, is friends with the owner, Elaina Paige Thomas. “When she said she had a vision of starting an agency here in Kansas City, I told her, you know, Kaiden would be great at that,” Ashley says. “He was maybe four or five years old at the time, super into Transformers toys. If you said, ‘Hey, Kaiden, transform’, he would literally stop everything and fold up like Bumblebee or something. That’s what he did for his audition.”
Kaiden trained for a few years, getting a voiceover gig in 2022, then a lot of rejections until he was cast in the Lifetime movie by Thomas, who was working as casting agent for the movie. “This acting gig is right up his alley,” Ashley says. “Because of his personality, he is super animated, he loves storytelling and reading books, and he’s always been the life of the party.”
Masai Long
Nutrition business operator
Age 16
Masai Long, with the help of his mother, created and operates his own nutrition business, Masai’s Fresh Garden Eats from Dirt to Dish.
“I do pickles, hot sauce, barbecue sauce, pickled beets,” he says. “I do a lot of things.”
His products are available online, at various local farmers’ markets and at his booth during First Fridays in the Crossroads. Masai made his first product, a tea, a few years ago using pomegranate and “a lot of different herbs. People ended up liking it,” he says.
His mom, Sunni Long, helps him make products to sell, such as a mixed greens salad. “It’s weird because he doesn’t like dressing,” says his mom, an educator and nutritionist. “When he was little, he liked to just go out in the garden and pick his own herbs. So now, literally, that’s all he’ll eat on the salad. We call that the Masai salad. Whenever we have a family gathering, we always bring that—just random greens with random herbs in there with no dressing.”
A career in nutrition and food is a natural fit for Masai. On his Facebook page, there are pictures of him in diapers on a chair, helping his mom cook. Later, he would imitate what his mom did but adding his own herb-heavy charm.
Masai started off with regular pickles. Now he makes and packages lemonade pickles, orange pickles, sour apple pickles, and sweet and spicy pickles. “He was making pickles with okra and that went over really well with people,” his mom says. “He just comes up with a lot of different things. At the beginning of the year, we sit down and do a whole brainstorm. And then we just execute that plan.”
Masai says that he wants kids to be able to eat holistically and eat well. “I want them to understand that even though they can have all the good things, that’s OK as long as it’s in a more nutritional way. Like with my products, where we use Stevia instead of sugar.”
Brijhana Epperson
Boxer
Age 16
Brijhana Epperson grew up floating like a butterfly. Now she stings like a bee.
Brijhana was a talented ballerina who eventually found her way onto the squared circle stage, beating the daylights out of opponents instead of lifting audiences with a perfectly executed grand Plié. She’s known as the “The Boxing Ballerina.”
Since she was a toddler, Brijhana has been a star performer in whatever she wants to do. She attended the Pulse Ballet School when she was just four, then moved on to the Kansas City Ballet by the time she was seven. Her proud dad, Courtney Epperson, supported her dance interests, but also threw in a few self-defense lessons. “Once I started to get the hang of it, I started asking him if I could go out to the gyms and start sparring with other kids,” she says.
At nine, she was competing in her first boxing match along with practicing ballet. At 12, she transitioned to boxing full time. “As soon as I stepped into the ring, I felt this amazing calm,” she says. It really clicked for me that this was it. This was my thing.”
With her dad coaching her, Brijhana amassed 14 national titles by age 15, including wins at the USA Boxing National Championships and Junior Olympics. “I just go in there, do my thing and don’t let a whole lot of stuff rattle me,” she says. “The biggest thing about me is I don’t give my opponents reactions. That just makes them madder. But there’s been a couple of moments where I’m like, all right, know what? Let me go ahead and handle my business,” she says.
In September, she won her 19th junior boxing title at the 2025 USA Boxing National Open championships in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She currently has 38 wins and 12 losses in her boxing career.
While at the national championships, Brijhana has been keeping her eye on who could be her Olympic competitors; she hopes to represent Team USA at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
“She’s ready,” her dad says. “Yes, she’s ready.”
“I’m definitely going to keep pushing, keep going,” she says.
Rafan Shah
Medical app developer
Age 15
“Seeing is believing” takes on a whole new meaning when talking to Rafan Shah, a 15-year-old innovator determined to make the world more accessible for people with visual impairments. His creation—an intuitive mobile application that helps users navigate their surroundings—began with one unexpected moment in his own life.
Rafan sprained his ankle and suddenly found himself unable to move freely without any assistance. That temporary loss of independence opened his eyes to what many visually impaired people experience daily.
Later, he saw a video of a blind woman expertly using her phone with a Braille keyboard, and it was an inspirational moment for him. “It blew my mind,” Rafan says. “I had never thought about how blind people actually use technology. It made me think about how people with impairments interact with the world more independently.”
From that realization came the Navigation and Orientation Visual Assistance mobile app, designed to act as a companion for visually impaired people. Using object detection and text-to-speech technology, NOVA scans a user’s surroundings through the phone’s camera and narrates what it sees, including text detection of a book title or other documents. It also responds to voice commands beginning with “Hey NOVA.”
Bringing his app to life was no small challenge. “At first, I was confused about how to even begin building it,” Rafan says. With the help of one of his cousins, Rafan learned to code and settled on Dart, an object-oriented programming language. The learning curve was steep. “It took me two or three weeks just to figure out how to use the camera properly,” he says. “There were so many things that didn’t work. But knowing I could help people kept me motivated.”
In December 2024, NOVA earned Rafan top honors in the Congressional App Challenge, a national competition held by the U.S. House of Representatives where members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle school and high school students. The goal is to encourage youth to learn to code and inspire them to pursue careers in computer science.
Rafan met one-on-one with U.S. Representative Sharice Davids to discuss accessible medical technology. Rafan emphasized one key truth: Assistive medical tech is often prohibitively expensive. Rafan hopes to change that with his app. NOVA’s prototype is currently testing, and pricing hasn’t been determined yet, but that hasn’t stopped Rafan from planning its next evolution. He hopes to integrate ARCore, which is technology used in augmented reality apps, to give users distance cues through audio or vibration alerts.
Rafan is also digging into another project meant to help people with hearing impairments: transforming everyday earbuds into affordable hearing aids by enhancing specific frequencies.
For Rafan, technology and health care are part of his future. His dad, Shah Islam, a software engineer who works in the health-care industry, says that Rafan wants to be a physician. “He’s not actively working on a software engineering career or something similar,” Shah says. “I told him that you can go into any field. You could use the technology to develop any creative idea, to realize any of the thoughts that you have and create something new for society.”
Shane Gifford
National spokesperson for Big Brothers Big Sisters
Age 19
Shane Gifford got thrown a serious curve in life when he was just a kid—his father died from brain cancer. “As you can imagine, at nine years old, still young and with a long way to go in life, I was really struggling,” Shane says. “I was just lost. My mom saw that. She just did a bunch of research, looking for anything and everything that could help me, and found Big Brothers Big Sisters. She got me listed waiting for a match.”
Help came knocking on his door in the form of Chris Moore, a tech engineer for T-Mobile, who became Shane’s Big Brother in 2017. For his Georgia Tech fraternity newsletter, Moore recalled the moment he read about Shane through Big Brothers Big Sisters. “If you read this document that this supposedly 11-year-old kid put together, you would have thought that it was a 30-year-old adult that wrote this thing about what they want out of life and what their hopes and dreams are, and I said, ‘I have to meet this kid.’”
As a a Big Brother, Moore was ready to go everywhere and do everything his Little, Shane, wanted to do. They went to Kansas City Comicon, they went bowling, they watched the Super Bowl together. Beginning in April 2022, Shane became more involved with Big Brothers Big Sisters, acting as a spokesperson, giving speeches, doing fundraising and recruiting other Bigs.
In 2023, Shane and Moore were selected as two of the lucky fans to read the first-round draft pick for the Atlanta Falcons at the NFL draft hosted in Kansas City (NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is a Big Brother).
Shane and Moore won the 2024 National Big and Little Brother of the Year award and were featured on the “Today” show. Also in 2024, Shane was chosen to join Big Brothers Big Sisters of America’s first National Youth Council.
“I always like to tell people you don’t have to be perfect to be involved or to help someone,” Shane says. “You just have to be present in their lives. And that’s just a little bit of time.”
Zoei Gipson
Missouri Boys and Girls Club Youth of the Year
Age 16
One of the most energetic and motivated people you’d ever want to meet is Zoei Gipson, sophomore at University Academy in Kansas City and the 2025 Boys & Girls Club’s Missouri Youth of the Year award winner.
Zoei traveled to Jefferson City to compete for the award, where she had to give a speech. It was a confidence test. “When I would falter, I would try to keep myself confident,” she says. “I relied on all of my mentors who were with me on the trip. A lot of that was just trying to stay motivated.”
The award selection committee also had her write three essays for judging. One was about teen mental health. “It was about how I feel about teen mental health,” she says. “It is not taken as seriously as it could be, or there’s not as many resources being pushed regarding teen mental health to get people my age the help they need.”
Zoei had her own mental health challenges. In seventh and eighth grade, she struggled with depression and “all the things that come with that,” she says. “So I wrote about that.”
Before winning the award, she had the opportunity to advocate on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. for teen mental health, where she demonstrated her skills at public speaking and was given opportunities to meet with representatives on Capitol Hill.
“The club pushed me out of my shell when I was just little,” she says. She’s been a club member since she was five.
Zoei plans to go into pre-med and open up her own dermatology practice after she graduates from the Academy. But for now, she is keeping her options open. “I’ve been thinking about going into some field of psychology or sociology, but I’m not too sure,” she says. “I hope to still be using my voice to educate people in ways that I can, bringing awareness to situations. I hope to still be caring and to help people the way that I can.”
Jack McGovern
Cross country champion
Age 16
It’s an understatement to say that Jack McGovern has uncommon grit. The guy ran 2,000 miles preparing for a key state cross country meet. Dude.
That’s Jack—a cross country standout from Rockhurst High School. He was the second fastest freshman in the 2024 Nike Cross Nationals, which is recognized as the premier national cross country event. He also ran the fourth fastest race by any Missouri high school runner ever in the Gans Creek Classic in Columbia, Missouri, last year. That time also made him the nation’s fifth fastest sophomore in 2025.
For the Gans Creek state race, Jack says that it was the first time he’d ever been in a state meet where he had a lot of big goals. “My coach and I talked about it the night before, how the idea was just for me to go out right at 2K, or right at 3K, and just build into it,” he says. “I knew I was fit enough going into it, and I just had to execute.”
Jack’s accolades are many. He also won the 2025 Missouri Class 5 Cross Country Championship, becoming just the fourth sophomore since 1975 to win the state meet. Hy-Vee and KMBC honored him as athlete of the week. And he was named a Nike All-American at the 2025 Nike Cross Nationals.
For his race strategy, Jack scouts out the pack at first, then just hammers the last part of the race. “I enjoy just being able to hunt people down.”
Michael Fang
Symphony cello player
Age 17
When 17-year-old Michael Fang, the principal cellist for the Youth Symphony of Kansas City, talks about playing for an audience, he already sounds like a seasoned professional. “I just stop thinking about the opportunity for mistakes,” he says. “I’m going to walk on stage. The audience wants to hear me. So I think about the emotions I want them to feel. In the midst of it, when I get into it, I am more focused on the music itself.”
Fang also plays in the Northland Symphony Orchestra, where he won the young artist competition performing Dvorak’s cello concerto, a demanding technical song for the cello.
“It’s a big swing for a high school student,” Jim Murray, the conductor of the Northland Symphony, says in praise of Michael’s performance. “It’s a mountain-top piece for a cellist.”
Michael has been selected to perform in the Missouri All-State Orchestra each year for the last four years, a high honor for any high schooler. This year, he was selected as principal cellist for the orchestra.
His parents, Lan Guo and Eugene Fang, both engineers, started taking Michael and his two brothers, twin Matthew and older brother Jonathan, both musicians, to all the free concerts in the area, plus the Kansas City Symphony, when the boys were just around six years old.
The Liberty School District, where Michael attends school, lets students try out different instruments to see if they’re interested in band or orchestra. Michael picked cello and started playing when he was 10. “Michael really grasped the way he wants to put his emotion into music,” says his mom. “He’s got a really natural ability.”
Michael is taking college-level math classes at Liberty High School now and is a 2026 National Merit Scholarship semifinalist. “I’m pretty passionate about the academic side, and I’m interested in college about pursuing a double major with maybe math and music at the same time,” he says. “But I’m still a bit undecided about what the future holds in terms of my professional career.”
Giulian Williams
Community advocate
Age 17
On February 5, 2024, Kansas City leaders and health department officials came together at City Hall to launch an extraordinary new initiative called Y Chat—a 24-hour violence prevention support line for teens. What makes the project even more powerful is its creator: a thoughtful, determined teenager named Giulian Williams who turned a deeply personal loss into a force for healing.
In 2009, when Giulian was just one, his older brother, Toriano II, was killed in a shooting in St. Louis. Although he was too young to understand the tragedy, the ripple effects shaped Giulian’s family and eventually inspired a mission of his own.
His invention, Y Chat, is a hotline that gives young people a safe place to call or text when they witness crime, feel unsafe or need help navigating conflict. Instead of routing calls to police, the line connects teens directly with trained conflict resolution staff from Aim for Peace, a health department program focused on reducing shootings and preventing retaliation.
Y Chat is a lifeline built on trust—something many young people say they don’t feel when turning to traditional authorities, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
“I was shielding Giulian from the tragedy of his brother’s murder because he was so young,” says his father, Toriano Porter. “As he grew older, I shared more. But you never really know how gun violence affects a child. When he came up with the idea for Y Chat, he said he hoped it could help another family and prevent someone else from going through what we did. I was so proud that he had the acumen at 15 to put this together.”
The idea took shape in 2022 through Giulian’s participation in a city-sponsored summer program run by MORE2, a faith-based community organization dedicated to racial and economic justice.
“Their assignment was to create something that would benefit the community,” Giulian says. “So I started brainstorming. I realized that I wanted to do something about gun violence happening where I live [Independence]. People should be able to speak up about what’s going on and still feel safe afterward.”
According to both police and health department officials, teens often know what’s happening in their neighborhoods long before adults do—especially as a result of social media. But distrust of law enforcement means many are hesitant to call 911, and they may not feel comfortable confiding in parents either. Y Chat fills that gap, offering a confidential, youth-centered approach.
Porter says that he will likely never find closure for the loss of his son. But he hopes the experience has shaped his family into “better stewards of the community.”
“Giulian took that tremendous loss and didn’t turn bitter or angry,” Porter says. “He chose to do something about it. Watching him turn pain into purpose made me incredibly proud.”
With vision, empathy, and a desire to protect others, Giulian is proving that leadership can emerge at any age—and that one young voice can help change the course of a community.
Quinton Smith
3D designer
Age 15
Quinton Smith was just sort of messing around with a 3D printer when he made a simple Chiefs keychain. He decided to make a few and sold them for 25 cents to his fifth grade classmates. No big deal.
Nothing could have prepared him for what happened next.
That keychain, a 3D arrowhead with the four Chiefs Superbowl wins listed, found a ready market on the city’s streets during the 2024 Super Bowl parade. As Quinton was leaving the parade, he handed one to a Chiefs superfan, Weird Wolf. “Then, later that week, that superfan posted a picture of the keychain, saying that he wanted to get more,” Quinton says. “He asked ‘Where can I find this kid?’ And then everyone just kept reposting and stuff until I got word of it.”
By the end of February 2024, Quinton was getting five orders a day. He had to buy extra 3D printers to meet the growing demand for not only his Chiefs keychains but the Royals and KC Current keychains he created.
His mom, “chief mom officer” Julie Smith, realized that this was becoming a very real business. “Luckily, right when he went viral, we had a lot of our friends reach out and help us,” she says. “So as soon as we set up the full business, things just kept getting crazier and crazier.”
Julie had to quit her job for a couple months to get things organized and now works more than 40 hours a week on the business her son inspired. “Quinton just finished an order of 2,000 key chains. So it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh.’”
When the Chiefs keychain went viral, the Smiths decided to give the money back to the community, Julie says. “We just didn’t expect all that money to end up in his Venmo account. So we do a 50/50 giveback program, which is 50 percent back to the community.”
Quinton is doing other 3D projects, such as 3D fidgets, with aspirations to design and build his own custom 3D printer for bigger projects.
Livia Viall
Home decor business owner and operator
Age 15
There’s no telling when the entrepreneurial spirit will kick in for anyone who wants to chase a personal dream. Most often it happens in your teens. But for Livia Viall, it was a little earlier.
In 2015, when she was just five years old, she asked her dad to help her build a farmhouse using some of his woodworking skills. “I just fell in love with the whole aspect of producing and getting to build it and everything, and doing something with my dad,” she says. “We were just able to learn together, and we started making home decor for my mom. Then my dad’s friend came over and was like, ‘Hey, I’ll buy this from you.’ From then on, it just took off.”
With the help of her dad, Livia started up Crafty Girl Creations right then, a company that produces both modern and vintage-style home decor, along with KC-themed signage. She sells them via Etsy and at local arts and craft shows. She donates a third of her proceeds to Children’s Mercy Hospital to help raise money to buy craft kits for kids during their hospital stays.
Livia splits up her time building new decor in the summer and spring, getting materials and putting projects together. Fall is show season.
As Livia continues to forge ahead with her business, she’s getting noticed. She was the under-30 winner in the 2022 Kansas Department of Commerce Outstanding Entrepreneur program. And she is getting invites from other women entrepreneur organizations and becoming more involved in Kansas City’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Building up and running her own business has caused some introspection. “I think the number one thing I have learned is that in order to make money, you have to spend money,” she says. “That was really hard for me as a young kid to grasp. But it’s been really cool to look back 10 years ago and imagine what I would tell my younger self about where I am today.”
Halley Vincent
Bookstore owner
Age 16
Bookstore owner and philanthropist Halley Vincent was an amazingly talented reader and painfully shy fifth grader who discovered a new outlet that changed her life. “I found an animal shelter that would let us come in on a day when they were normally closed,” Ali Vincent, Halley’s mom, says. “Halley would quietly come in and sit down and read to the dogs and cats, which increased her confidence because they’re not judging. And even back then, she was talking about being a philanthropist.”
Then, as it often does, an opportunity came from tragedy. In 2019, during Covid, Halley and her mom set up a free library in front of their house where people could drop by, take a book and leave a book. “People started to leave [books] at our little free library,” Halley says, and the library just kept growing.
Halley soon created a bookmobile. But this was not your ordinary bookmobile. “My first bookmobile was actually a riding lawnmower with a garden cart attached to it that we’d drive around my neighborhood,” she says. “Then one or two years later, we upgraded to a Cushman [golf cart].”
After around four years of running the bookmobile library, she decided to use a section of her mom’s art studio to try to sell new books, with proceeds going to a nonprofit she started, Paws UpKC, which supports local animal shelters. But that only worked for a while; the space was just 97 square feet. She is now the proprietor of a legitimate book shop called Seven Stories, located in a cute storefront just outside of downtown Shawnee (12115 Johnson Drive, Shawnee), where she features seven books each month, thus its name. “Everything has had a challenge with it that we had to work at,” Halley says. She makes money from selling new books and gift items and raises donations through her nonprofit.
Her unique skill is matching books with people, she says. “That is based on knowing people and having conversations about things they read or why they like to read.”
Brooklyn Franklin
Fashion Designer
Age 13
At the March 2024 Kansas City Fashion Week, one of KC’s youngest designers stole the show. At just 11 years old, Brooklyn Franklin unveiled her floral fitness wear line at the Union Station event’s main catwalk.
Kansas City Fashion Week is one of only 12 regional fashion organizations recognized by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and Brooklyn having the opportunity to present her ready-to-wear line is a real coup. Her Fashion Week debut was a playful departure from the casual designs she usually creates; she describes this collection as “anything girly with an extra edge of sass.”
Brooklyn is the owner and creative force behind her brand, BK Smartz-Designs. When describing how she preps for a show, she says, “I make my designs specifically for the fit of my models, and then they get to walk them down the runway,” already sounding like a seasoned designer.
Her love for fashion began at the age of four, inspired by watching her mother, Jovan Franklin, compete in modeling contests. “Seeing everything come alive—from art to fashion to style to music—she really took to it,” Jovan says.
A year later, Brooklyn’s grandmother gifted her sewing lessons at Zoelee’s Fabrics and Sewing School in Lee’s Summit. That’s where Brooklyn met owner Zoelee Donnell, who became a mentor of the young talent. “The first thing I told Zoelee was that I wanted to be a fashion designer,” Brooklyn says. “She said, ‘Oh honey, everyone says that coming in here.’ But I made it come to life. It happened because I had a dream and a goal—and my main goal was to be the youngest Kansas City Fashion Week designer.”
Last year, Brooklyn expanded her repertoire by adding a line of streetwear. “It’s still girly,” she says. “I’m adding bows and florals to my streetwear concept.”
Her ambitions go far beyond Kansas City. Last year, she traveled to Portland, Maine, to shadow designer Ashley Lauren at her headquarters. “She gave me a few tips,” Brooklyn says. “I learned a lot from her.”
Now 13, Franklin is charting a path to an exciting future. She dreams of moving to the East Coast to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, an internationally known design school. She hopes to eventually showcase her work at Milan Fashion Week, a semi-annual show in Milan, Italy, featuring top designers such as Prada, Gucci and Versace. “I have a lot of visions for fashion design in my head and ideas that I get from social media,” she says. “My best friend on this fashion journey has been Pinterest. I feel like that’s one of my big inspirations.”
For now, she’s focused on refining her growing portfolio. Her fitness line includes leggings, bike shorts and tube tops made with spandex and lycra. She’s also diving into upcycling. “It’s where you go to thrift stores and create new clothing,” she says. “I’m making jeans into shorts and stuff like that.”
With her ever-expanding imagination and drive, it’s clear that we might all be wearing a Brooklyn Franklin designs someday.
