First Baldwin WinterFest celebrates cultural diversity

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Bert Gervais, 38, a native of Haiti who now lives in Baldwin, helped organize Baldwin’s first WinterFest Jan. 29, with help from a number of Baldwin businesses.

Gervais, an educator, actor, producer and co-founder of Genius Potential Inc., brought the inaugural WinterFest to life, in partnership with Terrence Lee Jr., owner of New Lifestyles barbershop, at OMMA Martial Arts Center on Grand Avenue. He said he created the event to highlight the cultural variety of Baldwin by featuring a number of local artists, musical performances and businesses, free and open to everyone.

“I want to create a cultural hub and celebrate all that Baldwin has to offer,” Gervais said. “After spending a month on tour and shooting a television show, I felt so lonely, missed home, and felt some warm soup, live violin, and good company will help cure some of the winter blues.”

Gervais came up with the idea for WinterFest after spending three weeks in Kansas City, where he was a contestant in Season Seven of “The Blox,” a reality television show which he said is similar to “Shark Tank.”

Before that, Gervais said, he spent three months on a “Hamilton”-style improvisation tour about college that visited more than 15 states. The tour was produced by Genius Potential Inc., an entertainment and education company based in Brooklyn that he co-founded with David Horne in 2019, and was called, “Surviving College.

“I was on the road nonstop, and I hadn’t seen my friends and family in Baldwin in a while, and thought it would be nice to get everyone together for an event,” Gervais said of WinterFest.

He wanted to feature culture in the form of art, music and food, and the event, he said, was all about bringing the community together. He came up with the idea for a community winter event when he visited New Lifestyles Barbershop, on Grand Avenue. When he returned from filming for “The Blox,” Gervais said, he realized that the Baldwin community doesn’t have many winter events. 

Gervais said he hired Mylez Gittens, a Queens violinist, asked his cousin Dominique Gervais to perform choreographed dances to pop music, and invited local business people, like Fred Lherisson, founder of Boom-Boom Entertainment NYC, and Nicholas Grant, owner of Linyage Apparel, to set up vendor booths in the martial arts center.

Gervais came to the United States with his family in 1992, and grew up in Baldwin, where he attended St. Christopher’s Middle School before graduating from Chaminade High School, in Mineola, in 2002. 

After high school, he studied at Syracuse University, where he played Division I football for the Orangemen, and then transferred to Binghamton University, where he earned a degree in history and political science in 2007. 

For a number of years he worked at a variety of jobs, as a business developer, a mentoring program coordinator, an after-school enrichment services director, and the teen technology center director for the Boys and Girls Club of America in New Jersey. Gervais eventually settled into a job in which he could explore two of his passions — teaching and entertaining. He started working as a middle school science teacher at Brooklyn Lab Charter School in 2019.

 “I actually don’t mind spending my own salary on school supplies, because I don’t want to wait on the school to fund my crazy ideas in the classroom,” Gervais said. “Which is similar to what I do now in my life, which is fund my crazy ideas, like WinterFest.” 

Laid off at Brooklyn Lab at the height of the pandemic, the result of low enrollment and less demand for staff, he decided to devote himself to Genius Potential Inc. and a career as an artist. Most recently, he independently produced a hip-hop album titled, “You were here the whole time,” which he recorded at the Sound Lab, in Bellmore. He said he started working on the album — which explores themes like overcoming imposter syndrome and other mental health challenges — in 2013, but was distracted by other projects. 

“That’s why it’s called ‘You were here the whole time’ — because I was waiting for the perfect time to release the album, but there is no perfect time,” Gervais said. “For all the artists out there, there is no perfect time. Just put your art out.”

Gervais said that WinterFest was well received by the community, and he is planning a series of seasonal events. Although he doesn’t have a date yet, he is now working on organizing a similar event for the summer, a SummerFest.

“People kept asking me if there will be another one,” he said, “so as soon as we organize it, I will let the community know.”