With 2025 coming to a close and 2026 fast approaching, the Post is reflecting on the past year and the people in our community who inspired us this year.
From educators who go above and beyond to individuals who turn personal tragedy and tough circumstances into opportunity, Johnson County has a lot of impressive people.
So, as the year draws to a close, here are some of the Johnson Countians who brought us hope and inspiration in 2025, in no particular order.
(Find the list of Johnson Countians who inspired us in 2024 here.)
Global Care Force team, volunteers bring aid in a war zone
Even though missiles began flying overhead, a volunteer group based in Lenexa said they successfully completed their mission in Jordan in 2025 to serve residents and refugees without access to medical care.
What the team of five volunteers for Global Care Force had witnessed turned out to be the start of the fighting between Iran and Israel. They had been providing aid to residents and refugees, when air raid sirens started going off and missiles began flying overhead.
“We were at our accommodations. It started at night … It seems like as soon as it would get dark every night, you would start hearing things and seeing things in the sky,” said Roxanne Jones, registered nurse and vice president of global programs at Global Care Force.
During the visit in Jordan — marking the organization’s first on-the-ground clinic there — volunteers helped hundreds of the roughly 1 million refugees from other countries, such as Syria and Palestine, who were in need of medical care.
Read the full story here.
Cathy Hammack, leader of community garden at a Shawnee school
Cathy Hammack, a before-and-after-school program director with Johnson County Parks and Recreation, wears a lot of different hats. One is the leader of the school community garden at Clear Creek Elementary in Shawnee.
When she seeded the garden for a summer camp activity, she had hoped it would help both the students there and the community at large.
Since then, she said, it’s become more than just vegetables that have grown there. In a sense, she’s watched students grow there too, as they take the garden on as their own to maintain.
In the garden, students from kindergarten to fifth grade grow and harvest vegetables like tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and zucchini.
“We try to eat what we grow here, and then we also set up a table so that the parents can come take some home,” Hammack said.
Read the full story here.
Mike Scanlon, former public employee turned trail advocate
With nearly 40 years of local government experience, Mike Scanlon has spent much of his career working to connect people in the Kansas City metro area via trail systems.
Now, the former Mission city administrator — who was diagnosed with Stage IV non-small cell lung cancer in 2024 — is an executive director for Kansas Trails Inc. As part of that role, in 2025, he took a month-long journey to bike 700 miles of trails across Kansas.
The goal, he said, was to showcase what he believes is a commonality between trails and cancer fighters: Resilience.
“It’s all about resilience,” Scanlon said. “Can you work hard enough, long enough to make a trail come to fruition? That’s really sort of why I married the two things. I go, cancer’s kind of about resilience.”
Read the full story here.
Nan Kanter, local Special Olympics catalyst
Nan Kanter, through her position with the Blue Valley Recreation Commission, helped launch and oversee the Blue Valley Special Olympics program roughly 30 years ago. When she first started the program, she was looking for a way for her son Michael, who has a disability, to get more involved in his community.
Now, the program is called the Blue Valley Blue Streaks, and it comprises more than 150 athletes in various sports and of various ages.
Kanter has retired from her position, but still spends 10 to 15 hours a week lending a hand with the program whenever she can and cheering on athletes.
Read the full story here.
Myrl Wear, longtime Scoutmaster
The scoutmaster for Boy Scouts’ Troop 93 in Shawnee since 1996, Myrl Wear has been helping guide Boy Scouts from adolescence to adulthood, including watching more than 260 scouts — among them his sons and grandson — become Eagle Scouts.
It’s been an unexpected run for the southern Kansas native, who originally joined the Scouts to help his sons navigate the group when they were young.
Now, he spends time inspiring others through camping experiences or roughing it in the winter weather at the annual Trappers Rendezvous retreat in Harvey County, Kansas.
“Most scoutmasters do this for two or three years,” he said. “I just had so much fun that I kept on doing this.”
Read the full story here.
Monica Ommert, parent turned pedestrian safety advocate
Monica Ommert’s 10-year-old son, Duke, died after the e-scooter he was riding on Lee Boulevard was hit by a car on Oct. 13.
Duke and his neighborhood friends had been playing a scavenger hunt trading game called “Bigger or Better” that afternoon. His mother said she talked to him via his smart watch and told him to be home by 6 p.m.
Later, she would drive past several ambulances on the route that he should have been taking home. She pulled over and saw Duke’s helmet and shoe on the ground.
At a recent Leawood City Council meeting, she held up a large portrait of him while describing that day. She is one of several parents in Leawood who have asked city councilmembers for better pedestrian protections after their children were injured or killed in accidents involving cars.
They urged councilmembers to make more effective signage, pedestrian barriers and slower speed limits an immediate priority, especially in the north Leawood area around Corinth and Brookwood elementary schools. (And they’re already making progress.)
Read the full story here.
Meghan Jolliffe, a survivor and blood donation proponent
Seven years ago, donated blood saved Meghan Jolliffe’s life. A lot of donated blood.
She was in labor at Overland Park Regional Medical Center when she suffered a rare and extremely dangerous pregnancy complication called an amniotic fluid embolism. It caused a “cardiac arrest, severe hypoxia and uncontrolled bleeding,” Jolliffe said.
“What should have been one of the happiest days turned into a day that I don’t remember, and many can’t forget,” she said.
Her son was delivered via emergency C-section while another doctor performed CPR. It took 14 minutes for her heart to start beating again on its own, and a massive transfusion protocol was initiated to combat blood-clotting issues stemming from the complication.
In all, she received 109 units of blood.
“A great medical team and science took us as far as it could, but it was blood, the selfless gift of strangers, that did the rest,” she said. “Because of blood donations, I’m still here. I’m alive. I’m a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister and a friend.”
Jolliffe recounted her story of how blood donation had saved her life during a ceremony celebrating the official grand opening of the first American Red Cross fixed donation center in the Kansas City area in August.
Read the full story here.
Suzanne Johnson, advocate impacted by infectious disease
Adopted from Korea in the late 1960s, Suzanne Johnson just doesn’t know a lot about the story of her early life.
One thing she does know for sure is that, before she came to the U.S. at age 3, she had measles, and the illness left its mark on her forever. She developed Bell’s Palsy, a rare type of partial facial paralysis that is often temporary.
For Johnson, the paralysis that affects the left side of her face has been permanent, and, according to the minimal medical records she’s been able to access from before her adoption, it was caused by having measles as a toddler.
The condition makes it hard for her to control the left side of her mouth. And her left eye doesn’t close all the way, leading to chronic dryness. All of that made it even harder to fit in growing up in a white family in the American South during desegregation.
A vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) has been available for more than a generation now. However, as vaccination rates slip and more outbreaks crop up across the U.S. each year, public health officials and doctors warn that more cases — and with that, more severe illness with potentially lifelong implications — are likely.
Johnson feels strongly that people should be entitled to make decisions for their own families when it comes to things like vaccinations. However, she wants to be sure everyone makes those choices with information from the best sources available and with all the facts in mind.
In 2025, she said she felt compelled to speak up about her experiences with lifelong complications from the illness.
“I’m here to say ‘This is what your child could look like,’” she said, gesturing toward the left side of her face. “If you can prevent this, would you want to? I would, as a parent.”
Read the full story here.
Allison Bowman, local artist and prairie conservationist
Olathe artist Allison Bowman put a vending machine in Lenexa Public Market to help with nature conservation efforts in the area, with the help of other local artists.
The “Prairie In The Parks” vending machine spread art and awareness in the Lenexa Public Market through four collectible stickers that pay homage to four Johnson County parks maintained by Johnson County Parks & Recreation District Natural Resources and Kansas City Wildlands.
Money generated from each 50-cent sticker sale was split between the JCPRD Foundation and the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas to support local and regional prairie preservation efforts.
For Bowman, the mission pays tribute to the Konza Prairie near her hometown of Manhattan, Kansas. The project also shines a light on the importance of both local artists and nature.
“My work, my art practice, has a lot to do with mental health and well-being and nature,” she said. “So getting out and seeing these natural spaces that we have in our community, I think, are really important for us as human beings to experience.”
Read the full story here.
Orrin Lovewell, volunteer who keeps beloved farmstead running
Orrin Lovewell has spent roughly the past 18 years caring for the grounds at the Deanna Rose Children’s Farmstead, even after the local attraction has closed down for the season.
He visited the farmstead for the first time with his granddaughter years ago, and said even then he could sense that it would become a special spot for him.
Lovewell got his start as a volunteer in 2007. Six years after beginning to volunteer, he took a paid position working in guest services at the farmstead.
He spent six years in that position, greeting guests as they stepped onto the farmstead’s grounds. After retiring from that position in 2019, he returned to his roots as a volunteer.
These days, Lovewell spends most of his time each week helping out with various tasks. There’s a lot to do at the beginning of the spring, he said — usually starting with preparing the farmstead’s baby goats for the season after they’re born in February.
The fall tends to be especially busy too, between tasks like facilitating the farmstead’s wagon ride, building Pumpkin Hollow, and setting up for two weekends of spooky festivities at Night of the Living Farm.
“I’ve done a little bit of everything,” he said.
Read the full story here.
Emeline Wilinski & Lucy Even, teens improving water access in Africa
For Emeline Wilinski and Lucy Even, what started as a school research project has morphed into something more.
This past spring, the two (then) seventh-grade students at Indian Hills Middle School worked together on a research project focused on water scarcity around the world.
Through the project, the two friends said they quickly realized how widespread water scarcity really was, and how many communities around the world don’t have access. So they set out to do something about it.
They funneled those efforts into launching a fundraiser to help facilitate the building of a new well in Africa.
Emeline and Lucy’s “Kids for Water” proceeds go toward Water Wells for Africa, an organization that allows people to create their own fundraisers to raise money for wells in Africa.
Read the full story here.
Krrish Sanjanwala and Pranith Surapaneni, teen storytellers about vitiligo
High school friends Krrish Sanjanwala and Pranith Surapaneni know that with autoimmune disease, there’s often more than meets the eye.
Sanjanwala and Surapaneni both experienced this while growing up with vitiligo, a condition that results in patches of skin losing color. Sanjanwala also has alopecia, another autoimmune disorder that causes hair loss, as does Surapaneni’s brother.
As recent graduates of Blue Valley Northwest High School, the two understand that the autoimmune diseases they’ve experienced firsthand have impacts on both the inside and outside. But for younger kids, they know it can sometimes be hard to see past what the outside looks like.
This is what inspired them to start writing children’s books centered around autoimmune diseases and what it’s like to grow up looking “different” because of them.
With their ongoing book series, “Words for Wellness”, the duo said they hope to spread awareness for both young readers with autoimmune diseases as well as other kids who might encounter others with such conditions.
Read the full story here.
