St. Joseph the Protector Foundation: A National Grantmaker in Rented Rooms

Incorporated as the Women's Care Center Foundation; federal ruling August 2002; renamed in 2024–25; seat at 220 West Fourth Street

Lead: The register's most surprising seat is a national grantmaker working out of a parish office building. St. Joseph the Protector Foundation Inc (EIN 38-3651599) rents its offices in St. Joseph Parish's office building at 220 West Fourth Street — the parish's own bulletin carries the arrangement, rent paid for the foundation's rooms — and from those rooms it grants across the country. The corporation is the former Women's Care Center Foundation, Inc.: its mission in its own filings is "to protect life by investing strategically in its defenders… strengthening the most effective pregnancy centers, maternity homes, adoption agencies, and pro-life initiatives," and its earlier Form 990 states the program directly — it "provided grants to Women's Care Center, Inc. to provide pregnancy counseling, education, and support for women," one of the centers nationwide the foundation exists to fund. The renaming stands in the trademark record: applications for the St. Joseph the Protector Foundation mark were filed in June and December 2024 in the Women's Care Center Foundation's name, and by 2025 the foundation's own staff bios use the new name with the old in parentheses. The Women's Care Center's own story — founded in South Bend in 1984 — belongs to the charities and South Bend files; the foundation's Mishawaka seat is this section's.

Its scale prints at filing strength, with a swing the record does not reconcile. For its fiscal 2022 the foundation reported total assets of $38,193,804, revenue of $5,686,272, and grants to domestic organizations of $3,779,694. A compilation of a later filing puts its assets at $49.2 million and revenue at $8.7 million, with total giving of $4,263,962 in its compiled year. The register's most recent row, however (tax period ending December 2025), reports assets of $15,353,215 and revenue of $5,201,315 — a balance sheet less than half the fiscal 2022 figure. The three readings stand dated and unblended: a foundation that grants at national scale will swing with its grant years and its gifts received, and the intervening returns were not pulled to draw the line between them. What every reading agrees on is the structure: a Mishawaka-seated foundation of eight-figure scale whose grantees are a national movement's local institutions — maternity homes of the same type as Mishawaka's own Hannah's House, though no grant to Hannah's House is asserted here, because none appears in the filings reached.

Sources:

1. The foundation's Forms 990 as compiled (Intellispect, Cause IQ, Instrumentl): mission and program statements, fiscal 2022 assets/revenue/grants, later-filing totals.
2. IRS Business Master File, Indiana extract, November 2026: St. Joseph the Protector Foundation Inc (EIN 38-3651599, ruling August 2002, tax period 202512, assets $15,353,215, revenue $5,201,315).
3. USPTO trademark records: "St. Joseph the Protector Foundation," applications of June and December 2024, owner Women's Care Center Foundation, Inc., Mishawaka; the foundation's staff biographies (2025) using the new name; St. Joseph Parish Mishawaka bulletin: the foundation's rented offices at 220 W. Fourth Street.