By RICK PETERSON
TopSports.news
The Jones Project’s executive director, Damon Parker, a two-time state wrestling champion as an athlete and a five-time state champ as a coach, is always looking for new mountains to climb.
So after Parker and the Advisors Excel/The Jones Project team completed the equivalent of a climb to the top of Mount Everest over 36 hours last weekend in Steamboat Springs, Colo., they have already turned the page to the next big project: the launching of The Jones Project’s Leadership Academy, a free eight-week program open to students selected from each of the 10 Shawnee County high schools.
The Jones Project, named in honor of the late Josh Jones, a native Topekan who served as a vice-president at Advisors Excel before passing away in March of 2021, provides free mental health programming to secondary students, providing assistance to students who are struggling while emphasizing the importance of specific mental health interventions already in place at schools.
In its first four years The Jones Project has reached more than 115,000 students from 267 different stages. In 2023 TJP created an endowment for The Jones Family Scholarship, which has since provided scholarships to six Kansas high school graduates who are studying to become mental health professionals.
The 29029 climb in Steamboat, Colorado kicked off Year 5.
"It's an event where you start at the base of a mountain and you climb it to the summit and then you ride a gondola back down to the bottom and then you do that over and over and over again,'' Parker said. "This year at Steamboat we had to climb 14 times in 36 hours. If you do that then you've reached the vertical gain of Mount Everest.
"The Jones Project and Advisors Excel has had a team that's worked together on this and done it as a fundraiser every year. This is one of the two big fundraisers that keeps The Jones Project afloat. This year we've really made a push on it so that we can use this campaign to fund The Leadership Academy.''
Parker, who has coached the Rural girls to four state titles and coached the Junior Blues to the 2021 boys championship, has served as the executive director of The Jones Project since its inception after being approached by Advisors Excel co-owner Cody Foster.
"He and I had met several times and when he presented the vision he had for The Jones Project to me, I saw it as an opportunity to still work with young people but to do it on a much larger scale and to be able to help kids that were falling through the cracks. Many of them were in a truly under-served population,'' Parker said. "And it was like, 'How do you say no to the opportunity to do something like that?'
"I loved teaching, it was wonderful, and I'm still in education, I just have a bigger classroom now. Every year TJP has evolved and we've become more effective with what we've done. It took awhile to find out where those needs were and exactly what kids needed. It started off with just a mental health and suicide prevention talk, but now we do talks on bullying prevention, student leadership, culture building, you name it. We’ve talked to athletic teams in the locker room before competitions, strength and conditioning programs, and summer STUCO camps. Wherever there is a school or student organization that needs a speaker, we can help fill that gap.”
Parker said the Leadership Academy represents another major step forward.
"If we can take a couple of students from each high school in the Shawnee County area and we can give them real, actionable leadership skills, that is going to instantly impact the organization of which they are a part. Whether it's the basketball team, the debate team, or the marching band is inconsequential. We’re helping them improve their building culture because now we're taking those kids and we're teaching them how to bring up those younger kids,'' Parker said.
"And when the younger kids are learning from those older kids they realize, 'This is how you do it, this is how you treat people,’ and then they carry that forward with them throughout their remaining time in high school.”
The Leadership Academy is now taking applications and will begin meeting in mid-September.
"I'll be reaching out to basically every coaching and A.D. contact in my rolodex saying, 'Hey, we're doing this thing and it's definitely something that you want your kids to be involved in,' '' Parker said.
"We're going to start taking applications now and then the first week in September is when we're going to announce who is accepted into the program. And then we're going to get it kicked off. We will absolutely be up and rolling with students by mid-September, so they’ll want to get in their applications as soon as possible. This is the start of something HUGE here in Shawnee County.''
Students can use the website www.TopekaLeadershipAcademy.org to apply.
For more information email Coach Parker at
