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Headquarters Counseling Center has started a Save Headquarters campaign with the goal of raising $90,000 in the next three weeks so that it can continue to provide its current level of suicide prevention services beyond the end of the year.

Headquarters provides local and statewide suicide prevention hotlines and offers training and consultation services in Lawrence and other Kansas communities, said Andy Brown, Headquarters executive director. However, what the agency’s board is calling a state of emergency is threatening Headquarters’ ability to continue that work past Dec. 31.

The agency’s board set the goal of raising $90,000 by Dec. 5. A failure to do so could mean scaling back Headquarters’ current 24-hour crisis phone line operation that receives more than 20,000 calls a year, reducing or eliminating suicide prevention outreach training and consultation, cutting back on its three-person staff, merging with another entity or even closing its doors.

Andy Brown, executive director of Headquarters Counseling Center

“We’re not holding our breath for the state or federal governments to shower us with money,” Brown said. “We’ve been doing this a long time. It’s pretty clear if we’re going to continue to do this, the support is going to have to come from the private sector. Every dollar counts right now.”

For the fundraising campaign, Headquarters has established the website prevent-suicide.givecorps.com/projects/20134-save-headquarters. The site allows donors to donate at $10, $25, $50 or $100 levels by clicking on the appropriate icons or writing in their own donation, Brown said. As of Sunday, the website reported the campaign had raised $7,500.

Headquarters has an annual operating budget of about $240,000, Brown said. Just less than half of that supports his salary, that of Kristin Vernon, director of counseling services, and one full-time graveyard shift counselor to answer phone lines. The other half pays for rent and utilities and $18,000 per year needed to recruit, train and retain Headquarters’ 60 volunteers.

“But we get $300,000 of labor from our volunteers, so that’s a pretty good trade-off,” Brown said.

A number of factors have contributed to the funding crisis, Brown said. Headquarters no longer receives funding from the city of Lawrence, nor has it been for three years one of the agencies the Lawrence-Douglas County United Way funds, he said. Additionally, federal grant money available through a statewide grant ended in 2015 and was not renewed, he said.

The funding woes that would come with the end of the federal grant were anticipated. Since Brown was hired as executive director in 2014, Headquarters has restored $45,000 in annual support from the University of Kansas Student Senate and initiated fee-for-services for clinical and “gatekeeper” layman training, such as for assistance in starting suicide-prevention community coalitions, Brown said. Those funds with private and foundation donations provide a foundation for Headquarters’ $240,000 annual budget, Brown said.

Even should the fundraising campaign be successful, Headquarters would look for ways to become more sustainable, Brown said. That includes becoming more efficient at fundraising and more fee-for-services work, he said.

One model for the latter effort is a three-year consultation and training relationship Headquarters developed with Fort Hays University to establish a suicide hotline, Brown said. Although that hotline would be outside of Headquarters’ framework, it did collect collect fees for training and technical assistance, he said. The agency is now exploring those arrangements with a number of smaller community colleges and universities in the area, he said.

Should Headquarters be forced to close or limit hotline hours, calls would still be answered by other crisis centers in the national suicide prevention network, Brown said. But those calls would be more likely to be put on hold or get bounced around by responders, he said.

“If we do close, we will be one of a number of crisis centers that have stopped taking calls,” he said. “Unfortunately, crisis line centers as a whole are experiencing funding problems.”

Lawrence does benefit from having the state’s suicide crisis center in the community, Brown said.

“We’re available to provide a resource or help to the community,” he said. “We’re asked to participate in community projects and activities, which we do without being compensated. We participate in the crisis intervention training being given (to) law enforcement officers, and we helped to establish the Douglas County Suicide Prevention Coalition.”