Columbine survivor to speak at Mayor's Prayer Breakfast
Courtesy photo Kevin Parker will speak at the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast May 1.
MOSES LAKE — Spokane-based businessman and former Washington state legislator Kevin Parker will be the featured speaker at this year’s Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast in Moses Lake on May 1.
“Faith has always been an important part of my life since high school,” Parker said. “It’s always been how we treat people, do we love others and treat them with dignity and respect?”
Parker, who owns nine Dutch Bros. Coffee franchises in the Spokane region, was in the state legislature from 2008 to 2016, where he helped oversee the state’s budget and worked across the aisles to promote economic development and help the state’s homeless.
He currently teaches management and leadership at Whitworth University and Gonzaga University in Spokane.
He was also working for Youth Life in Columbine, Colo., helping young people develop their faith, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 and wounded 21 at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.
“I was meeting a student for lunch (at the high school), and I was the only adult volunteer there that day,” Parker said. “The inspiration for a lot of my thinking about leadership comes from that tragedy.”
“He’s a Christian businessman, highly respected,” said France Irwin, a prayer breakfast organizer. “The Lord led us to him; the Lord wanted him to be our speaker.”
Organized by the Moses Lake Kiwanis, this is the city’s 25th prayer breakfast since a group of clergy got together in the 1990s to bring speakers to town and pray for the community, state, and nation. Tickets are $20 per person, or $150 for a table, and reservations need to be made by April 20.
The breakfast begins at 7 a.m. in the ATEC Building at Big Bend Community College, and is scheduled to end around 9 a.m.
“We may have more people than ATEC can hold,” Irwin said. “I’m expecting about 220, so I’ll have to juggle seating, and fill empty seats at company tables with paying individuals.”
Irwin said the prayer breakfast was an important community gathering.
“It’s a wonderful time to bring people of many different expressions of faith together, to know that we are held together by our Lord,” she said.
For more information on the upcoming Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast, or to make reservations, contact Francie Irwin at 509-750-2074 or francie@irwinnw.net.
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.
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