Originally from Edmonton and Vancouver Canada, James Parr earned bachelor degrees in English and Education from the University of British Columbia and a Masters of Education degree from the University of Vermont. He has lived in the United States since 2005 and became a US citizen in 2017.
James began his career as a middle and high school English teacher while also coaching track, cross country, sailing and tennis. From there he transitioned into special education work, providing 1:1 support to students with a variety of intensive needs and challenges including autism, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, language and cognition deficits, and significant social cognition/ social-emotional learning challenges.
While maintaining an unwavering commitment to nonprofit organizations, James realized that his specific creative skills enabled him to make the greatest impact in education and beyond from behind the scenes rather than the front lines.
Blessed with a highly creative mind, James has had innate abilities in writing, visual art and especially music from a very young age, learning piano at age 3, drums at 13 and guitar at 14, followed by vocals, bass, mandolin, songwriting, live performance, recording and music production. Combining his creative passions and skills, he has designed his own album covers, liner notes, websites and show posters since the beginning of his music career.
An athlete and fitness/outdoors enthusiast, James is also an avid world traveler, having driven through 43 US states and a third of US National Parks, and backpacked solo through 18 European countries, New Zealand, Australia and Fiji. His portfolio of creative work includes extensive photography and travel essays spanning many years and several continents.
From 2012 to 2025, James supported the K-12 Education initiative at the Gates Foundation in Seattle. In his administrative and communications-oriented role, he made significant creative contributions to the important work of improving educational outcomes for the nation’s youth, particularly those in low-income, minority and special needs populations. The audiovisual presentations he has created, often featuring popular music clips, have been viewed by thousands of top education and community leaders at meetings and conferences across the country, and his editing and composition skills have enhanced crucial communications to key partners and stakeholders.
During the course of this work, James connected with countless CEOs, founders, presidents, directors and the like, and came to realize that the people doing this vital work are understandably far too busy to spend time on quality control for spelling, grammar and structure, or to think about images, graphics, logos, spacing, font size, colors, or the myriad other ways communications can and should be improved and enhanced. But as James notes, this (understandable) lack of bandwidth doesn’t make these details any less important:
“In the nonprofit world, your message matters – a lot. Which means how you convey that message also matters a lot. You don’t want to risk coming across as unprepared or unprofessional when there are children and families at stake. You don’t want a giant conference room filled with potential funders to glaze over and completely tune out because for the hundredth time they’re seeing a PowerPoint with way too much text per side, in a far-too-small black font on a white background, with no sound or images – just like every other presentation ever. When you lose their attention this way, your message is lost, your time (and theirs) is wasted, and there is no forward momentum.”
It was with this level of conviction that James founded the consulting firm JP Design Communications, to help tackle the key written and visual communication details that organizations simply don’t have time for, but also can’t afford not to consider.
Let us do the work for you. Because your message, and how you communicate it, matters.
JP Design Communications 