Organizational Succession: The Groups Around the System

The city built the system; a succession of organizations grew up around its use, and their dates are these. The Michiana Area Council of Governments, the region's planning body, stands behind the system's regional half — the partner through which the Merrifield extension was awarded and the body whose trail inventories the ledger entry below names. The Indiana Michigan River Valley Trail partnership — the river cities and counties joined for the regional trail that runs from Niles through South Bend to Mishawaka — carries the connective planning the trails section's connections article describes. The advocacy line begins with Michiana Bike to Work Week, founded in 2006 by a small group of bicycle advocates to promote the bicycle as daily transportation. Its organizational successor is the Bike Michiana Coalition, organized 8 August 2008 — the date stands in its bylaws — and incorporated as a 501(c)(3) whose stated purpose is to facilitate communication between the area's bicycle groups and to promote bicycle safety and advocacy; by 2012 its president, Judy Lee, was testifying before the South Bend council as the coalition joined Bike the Bend and Grass Roots Media in funding the city's wayfinding bicycle signs, a $5,200 appropriation of donated money in the council record of 12 March 2012. The charity-ride line runs on the Mishawaka walk itself: Bike Michiana for Hospice, ridden with the Center for Hospice Care, sent more than 1,200 cyclists out in its sixth annual running on 14 September 2014, and the Walk for Hospice walked the Mishawaka Riverwalk on 10 August 2014 from the Center's Mishawaka campus at 501 Comfort Place. The riding clubs stand at pointer: the Michiana Bicycle Association, seated in Granger, keeps the road-riding calendar. No merger marks the succession — week to coalition to standing nonprofit is a growth line, not a consolidation — and the operator of the ground itself never changed: the city's Parks and Recreation Department, from the first mile to the present course.