About this site

What this is

Headquarters Counseling Center was a volunteer crisis line and counselling centre that operated in Lawrence, Kansas from December 1969 until its web presence ended in 2020. Its history also illuminates volunteer crisis-line counselling as a field of practice.

The organisation's published material was substantial and unusually candid.

What this is not

It is also not the organisation, not a successor to it, and not authorised by it. The organisation is alive. It trades today as HeadQuarters Kansas, also known as Kansas Suicide Prevention HQ, and its site is hqkansas.org. It answers 988 for the overwhelming majority of Kansas counties. If you arrived here looking for the organisation — to reach it, to support it, to volunteer with it, or to use it — you want their site and not this one.

The shared name makes the non-affiliation notice especially important. A reader could reasonably arrive expecting that organisation. The non-affiliation notice at the foot of every page exists for that reader, and it is not decoration: it is the single most load-bearing sentence on the site.

Where the organisation is now

The short version: it grew, it renamed, and it was absorbed into a national system that it had spent years campaigning for.

By its fiftieth year the organisation had two programmes — the counselling centre itself and a statewide Kansas Suicide Prevention Resource Center — a new building, several new grant sources, and a staff that had gone from four people to twenty. It subsequently reorganised under the HeadQuarters Kansas / Kansas Suicide Prevention HQ name. When the national three-digit crisis number went live in July 2022, Kansans dialling 988 reached Lawrence counsellors.

The last piece of that transition closed at the end of 2025, when the legacy Douglas County local line was retired and callers were directed to 988 instead. That is the single most important operational fact for anyone reading an old page: the local number that appears throughout the organisation’s publication no longer reaches anyone. Only 988 is provided as a crisis contact.

Privacy and safety boundaries

No retired contact details, fundraising or recruitment material, private records, or information about anyone who used the service are provided.

Every telephone number and address

The local crisis line, the toll-free Baldwin City line, the two national toll-free numbers, the administrative line, and the street address. Two of these are dead, one was retired at the end of 2025, and any of them could send a frightened person somewhere useless. Only 988 appears anywhere on this site.

Every e-mail address, form and chat surface

The organisation formerly published staff e-mail addresses, an information-specialist address, RSVP forms and a crisis chat. An unattended form is worse than no form at all in this subject area.

Fundraising and recruitment

Donation pages, membership tiers, the 2017 awareness-and-fundraising campaign, volunteer applications and job posts are not current opportunities. Soliciting money or labour on behalf of an organisation that still exists would conflict with the non-affiliation notice.

Names

Staff rosters, board members, the roughly twenty named professionals with e-mail addresses on the state-committee page, and a student who wrote a supporting letter are not included. Three leadership roles are discussed below.

Stale directories presented as current

The period survivor-support directory carried postal addresses and phone numbers for organisations across the country, and it bore an update stamp from 2009. Republishing a sixteen-year-old directory of crisis-adjacent contacts would be actively harmful. It is described as a historical artefact and replaced by a short list of current national resources.

The three people the history turns on

The organisation's own history is built around three figures, each extensively documented in its published material and in Lawrence press coverage, and each named here by role only: the University of Kansas undergraduate whose proposal started the centre in 1969; the first full-time director, hired in 1971, who rebuilt it from a telephone in his own apartment after the collapse; and the executive director who ran it from 1979 into the late 2010s and chaired the state suicide-prevention subcommittee.

Nobody else appears. Not the volunteers, who were the organisation's actual workforce and are described only in aggregate. Not the paid staff. Not the board. And under no circumstances anyone who ever called, walked in, or sat in the bereavement group — the organisation’s publication was scrupulous about this and collected no demographic information about callers by design, and the same standard of care applies here.

Corrections

Statistics from the early 2000s, a resource directory last updated in 2009, and retired national networks are identified by date rather than presented as current. Where a figure could not be verified, it is not repeated. See research sources and safety standards for more context.