About this archive

What this is

This is an independent historical and educational archive about Headquarters Counseling Center — a volunteer crisis line and counselling centre that operated in Lawrence, Kansas from December 1969 until its web presence ended in 2020 — and about volunteer crisis-line counselling as a field of practice.

It exists because the organisation's published material was substantial, unusually candid, and about to vanish. Web pages are not archives; they are tenancies. When the tenancy lapses the material goes, and with it goes the only public account many small institutions ever leave behind.

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.

That distinction matters more than usual here, because the domain name this archive occupies is the organisation's former name. A reader could reasonably arrive expecting them and find us. 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 original site no longer reaches anyone. It is why this archive publishes no phone numbers at all except 988.

What was removed, and why

This archive is a selective reconstruction, not a mirror. Several categories of material from the original site are deliberately absent.

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 original carried staff e-mail addresses, an information-specialist address, RSVP forms and a crisis chat. A form on an archive is a message nobody will ever read, which in this subject area is worse than no form at all.

Fundraising and recruitment

Donation pages, membership tiers, the 2017 awareness-and-fundraising campaign, volunteer applications and job posts. Soliciting money or labour on behalf of an organisation that still exists — or in a way that could be mistaken for them doing so — is exactly the confusion the non-affiliation notice exists to prevent. Legacy donation and volunteer URLs redirect to this page and to the training history respectively.

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. Three leadership figures survive, by role, and are discussed below.

Stale directories presented as current

The original's 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.

Everything captured after the domain lapsed

Parking pages, a suspended-hosting notice, and injected junk content. None of it was the organisation's, and none of it is restored or redirected.

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 original site was scrupulous about this and collected no demographic information about callers by design, and this archive is not going to be less careful than its source was.

Corrections

Where the archive's source material is out of date — statistics from the early 2000s, a resource directory last touched in 2009, a national network that no longer exists — the page says so in place rather than quietly modernising the numbers. Where a figure could not be verified, it is not repeated. See sources and method for the full account of how this material was assembled and what standard it is held to.