





{"id":1623,"date":"2019-01-31T13:57:03","date_gmt":"2019-01-31T13:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/?p=1623"},"modified":"2021-06-24T15:20:04","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T15:20:04","slug":"january-2019-team-leader-of-the-month-donny-whitton-johnson-county-community-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/2019\/01\/31\/january-2019-team-leader-of-the-month-donny-whitton-johnson-county-community-college\/","title":{"rendered":"January 2019 Team Leader of the Month: Donny Whitton, Johnson County Community College"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-1624\" src=\"http:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2021\/06\/Donny-Whitton-234x300.jpg\" alt=\"Photo of Donny Whitton\" width=\"234\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2021\/06\/Donny-Whitton-234x300.jpg 234w, https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2021\/06\/Donny-Whitton.jpg 239w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 234px) 100vw, 234px\" \/>Donny Whitton of Johnson County Community College is our Team Leader of the Month! After serving 7 years in the Army as a combat engineer, Donny completed 2 associate\u2019s degrees at JCCC and is now working on a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy at Arizona State University. He plans to start an MBA degree in the fall. Additionally, he continues to take classes at JCCC and serves as the school\u2019s VA Certifying Official.<\/p>\n<p>Through his work as a Team Leader and Certifying Official, Donny\u2019s already excelling in his chosen career path of working in veterans services and higher education. He notes that he\u2019s confident his extensive PAVE Team Leader experience will help him in the future, because, he says, not many people applying for higher ed jobs have led a successful peer support program on a college campus.<\/p>\n<p>As one of the longest-tenured PAVE Team Leaders ever, Donny has been involved in implementing and growing PAVE on his campus since Spring 2016. \u201cWe\u2019re always trying to find new ways to identify veterans and get them involved in the community,\u201d Donny says, and he\u2019s accomplished this with initiatives such as the 2-day KCReCon conference, a convening of regional student veterans, colleges, and employers that he conceived and organized last fall. \u201cThis [KCReCon] was an excellent way to continue to build the bridge of connections between JCCC PAVE and our area partner universities,\u201d said Kena Zumalt, the VSC at JCCC.<\/p>\n<p>Donny says he\u2019s particularly proud of how, as a Team Leader, he\u2019s been able to help create camaraderie among the students vets at his school, aided by the way that the connections PAVE helps create form a kind of \u201cmental health safety net.\u201d We couldn\u2019t have put it any better ourselves. Thank you for all of your terrific work over the years, Donny!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Donny Whitton of Johnson County Community College is our Team Leader of the Month! After serving 7 years in the Army as a combat engineer, Donny completed 2 associate\u2019s degrees <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/2019\/01\/31\/january-2019-team-leader-of-the-month-donny-whitton-johnson-county-community-college\/\">&#8230; Learn More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1624,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1625,"href":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623\/revisions\/1625"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/m-span.org\/pave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}