Headquarters Counseling Center, 1969–2020

A church cheque for $858.55

The founding document was a proposal titled To Organize a Community Drug Use and Abuse Center. It came from a group of University of Kansas students and Lawrence residents, and it described what it wanted to build as a service organisation run by qualified student volunteers. The First United Methodist Church allocated $858.55 — enough to fund three months — and on 16 December 1969 the centre opened as a community drug-use centre with a twenty-four-hour telephone line.

The first premises were a communal house on Massachusetts Street with three live-in student staff. Anyone could call or walk in at any hour. High-school students in particular did. There was a drug library, there were classes, and there was somewhere to sit and talk. There was also an underground newspaper, which did not endear the operation to anyone.

The centre's own account of this period is refreshingly unsentimental about how it was received. It was controversial with its neighbours because of the noise and the people it attracted, and controversial with the wider town because of its anti-establishment orientation. Lawrence in 1969 did not universally regard caring young volunteers helping other young people who were already using street drugs as an obvious public good.

The drug-analysis programme and the collapse

In 1970 the centre incorporated as Headquarters, Inc. and moved to Mississippi Street. It launched a street-drug analysis programme in conjunction with the university — you could bring in a substance and find out what was actually in it — and by the centre's account it grew into one of the most respected programmes of its kind in the country.

In 1973 the Kansas Attorney General shut it down. What followed is the part of the story most organisations would edit out, and the centre never did: after that Headquarters began collapsing as community support, funding, and volunteer energy were going fast. It lost its premises and had no location of its own.

The recovery was almost comically thin. The first full-time director, hired in 1971, kept the organisation alive as a telephone line in his own apartment, and rebuilt from there. It is a useful thing to know about crisis lines generally: the irreducible core of one is a number that is answered. Everything else — the building, the programmes, the staff, the funding — is scaffolding around that.

Becoming a crisis line

1971 was the year the organisation became what it stayed. It ran its first formal training of volunteers, and it broadened from drugs into general referral, personal crisis and suicide intervention. It moved into premises on Kentucky Street, and for the first time staff did not live on site.

From 1972 it was known in Lawrence simply as the crisis centre — for people of any age with any kind of concern — and it began receiving money from the Lawrence United Fund, which later became the Douglas County United Way, and from University of Kansas student activity fees. That funding relationship with the student body lasted decades and is one reason the centre's history is so entangled with the university's.

In 1974, after a further drug raid, the county attorney asked the centre to build an alternative to incarceration for first-time drug offenders. The Court Diversion Program began with twelve of thirty-one arrested people referred without trial into a pilot. The same year, paid staff began providing individual and group counselling, along with guided imagery and biofeedback training — an early sign of a habit the organisation kept for fifty years, which was to take on whatever the community had no other provision for.

The long middle: 1975 to 2000

In 1975 the centre organised a spring festival in South Park for the whole city, called Everybody Day. It ran annually until 1985, and the name was revived decades later. A crisis line throwing a party for the town it serves is not a marketing tactic; it is how an organisation whose work is invisible and confidential stays real to the people funding it.

A director hired in 1979 — a volunteer since 1975 — went on to run the centre for the better part of four decades. Under that tenure the organisation moved to Massachusetts Street, started the Phone A Friend programme for children in 1985, and joined the American Association of Suicidology in 1986.

Then the numbers moved. Suicide-related contacts more than doubled between 1984 and 1987, and doubled again between 1987 and 1989. By 1991 total counselling use reached the highest point in the centre's history at close to eighteen thousand contacts — more than twice the figure ten years earlier. Whether that reflects rising distress, rising willingness to phone, or a centre that had simply become known is not answerable from the record, and the centre did not claim to know.

In 1994 it sponsored a gun turn-in, explicitly as a statement against impulse suicide. That is a means-safety intervention decades before the phrase was common in the field, and it sits oddly with the popular idea of a crisis line as a listening service only. A toll-free line was established in Baldwin City the same year, extending coverage into the surrounding area.

In 1996 the centre began a collaboration with United Way and the Lawrence Public Library on a community information and referral system, relaunching a long-standing programme as First Call for Help — one central number for referrals to community resources across Douglas and surrounding counties. From 1998 to 2001 it struggled with paid-staff turnover and falling volunteer numbers, trends it noted were being experienced at centres across the country, while working to broaden its funding base.

Going statewide, 2001–2005

In March 2001 the centre joined the National Hopeline Network, taking calls from every Kansas area code to a national toll-free suicide-prevention number. This is the point at which a Lawrence crisis line became a piece of state infrastructure.

In 2004 the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration funded the creation of what became the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and the centre began answering Kansas callers to that network too. It described itself as one of the founding agencies, part of the network from its inception in January 2005, the only centre in Kansas accredited by the American Association of Suicidology, and the only one answering Kansas calls to both national numbers.

The mechanics are worth understanding, because they explain why a small centre could carry a whole state. Calls to the national numbers were routed by the caller's area code to the nearest participating centre. If that centre's lines were busy the call rolled to the next centre in the network. The design meant a national number was always answered by somebody, and that a local centre's capacity limited how many of its own state's calls it handled — not whether those calls were answered at all.

The last decade

By the 2010s the organisation was running two things at once: the counselling centre, and a statewide Kansas Suicide Prevention Resource Center providing training and resources to schools, businesses, coalitions, civic organisations, churches, mental-health centres and law enforcement across Kansas. It was accredited, it was answering national lines, and it was chronically short of money — a 2016 post referred to a financial state of emergency, and a 2017 awareness campaign ran under the hashtag #saveHQ.

The centre also became publicly outspoken about how suicide is portrayed. In 2018 it issued statements on a widely watched television drama and published talking points on imitation risk after high-profile deaths. That advocacy is the reason this archive is written the way it is.

Then the fiftieth year, 2019, was the good one. The board chair's letter in the annual report describes a monumental change of location, several new grant sources, and growth from four employees to twenty. There was a gala. There was a volunteer reunion picnic in Centennial Park with burgers and an alcohol permit, open to anyone who had ever been a volunteer, board or staff member. There was, apparently, going to be a unicorn at Everybody Day.

The published record on this domain effectively stops in the first half of 2020, with a Kansas awareness-month post, a COVID-19 precautions notice and the 2019 annual report.

What happened next, and to this domain

The organisation continued under the HeadQuarters Kansas / Kansas Suicide Prevention HQ name at a different address on the web, which is where it is today: hqkansas.org. When the national three-digit number went live in July 2022, Kansans dialling 988 reached its counsellors. At the end of 2025 the legacy Douglas County local line — the number that appears on nearly every page of the original site — was retired in favour of 988.

This domain lapsed. Between 2023 and 2026 the only things captured at these addresses were a hosting-suspension notice, a parking lander and injected junk content. None of that is restored here and none of it redirects anywhere; those addresses stay dead, which is the correct outcome for them.

For the same events arranged as a chronology, see the timeline. For what the work itself consisted of, see how a volunteer crisis line worked.