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The family and citizen layer · the county chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness
Beside the providers stands the family layer, and in this county it is the St. Joseph County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness — NAMI, the national body founded in 1979 by families of the seriously mentally ill, organised in Indiana through NAMI Indiana. The chapter is a volunteer, family-and-consumer body, not a clinic: its own listings describe "support, education, and advocacy for people with mental illness, and their family and friends," free, offered to St. Joseph County residents and beyond, reachable at its long-published number and at namisjc.org. Its course inside the county's institutions is visible in the record at the points where the citizen layer touches the provider layer without merging into it: by 2005 NAMI stands in Portage Manor's own account among the outside organisations — with Camp Millhouse, the Logan Center and Special Olympics — providing the manor's festivities and off-site life for residents, a role no provider filled; and in November 2026 the chapter's standing work is its support groups, the NAMI Family Support Group and the NAMI Connection Recovery Support Group meeting together every second Monday, 6:30 to 8 p.m., at the Clubhouse of St. Joseph County, 1153 Northside Boulevard, South Bend — the chapter hosted by the county's other citizen institution, the Clubhouse, itself a community-built body (opened 2015 after the Sunshine Clubhouse's 2010 closure left the gap it records). The county's older citizen layer is on the record too: the Mental Health Association of St. Joseph County, the MHA whose meetings with the county home's administrator appear in the home's 1984 account, was the family's organised voice in the decades before the NAMI chapter's listings begin.
The chapter's founding date is a named gap of this section. The searches run whole for it: NAMI Indiana's own site and support-group listings (the chapter's current meetings, no history page); the chapter's own published record at namisjc.org as carried in the IU South Bend and Notre Dame resource guides (identity, number and services, no founding date); the nonprofit registers (Cause IQ's entry files "NAMI Indiana / St Joseph County–South Bend" under the state organisation's own 1990 ruling year, which is NAMI Indiana's date, not the chapter's, and is not printed here as the chapter's founding); and the county home's timeline (NAMI present at the manor by 2005). No open source reached names the year the St. Joseph County chapter was founded or its founders. The settling sources are named: NAMI Indiana's affiliate charter records in Indianapolis, and the chapter's own minute books and incorporation file (Indiana Secretary of State), with the South Bend Tribune's morgue as the press check.
Sources: NAMI Indiana, "Find a Support Group" (the South Bend meetings, second Mondays at the Clubhouse of St. Joseph County, as listed November 2026); IU South Bend Community Resource Guide and the Notre Dame South Bend Resource Guide (the chapter's identity, telephone and service description); St. Joseph County Home timeline (NAMI among the manor's outside organisations, 2005; the MHA meetings of 1984); Clubhouse of St. Joseph County (the Sunshine Clubhouse closure of 2010 and the Clubhouse's 2015 opening); NAMI (the national founding, 1979).