South Bend Foundations and Nonprofits

Nonprofits

Every city of any size is run twice: once by its governments, and once by the web of private corporations that exist for public purposes — the associations that speak for its businesses, the foundations that pool its charitable wealth, the corporations that rebuild its neighborhoods house by house, the leagues that register its voters and plead its causes, and the companies, in the old theatrical sense, that keep its orchestra and its stage alive. South Bend's second government is old. Its historical society dates to 1867, its chamber of commerce to 1909, its NAACP chapter to 1919 and its League of Women Voters to 1920; its community development corporations were born in a single remarkable decade, the 1970s, when three of them — two neighborhood corporations and a preservation developer — were founded within two years of each other. This section tells that sector's corporate history: when each body was formed, in what legal shape, what it did with that shape, and whether it is still standing. The relief half of the sector — the organizations that feed, shelter, heal and mentor — is told in the Charities section; what follows is the civic half.

A word about the dates, because this section leans on them hard. A nonprofit lives several lives on paper: the year its founders met, the year it incorporated, and the year the Internal Revenue Service issued its exemption ruling, and the three routinely differ by years or decades. Where the record gives more than one, this section prints each at its own strength — the founding as the organization tells it, the incorporation from the articles, the ruling from the federal register — and never averages them into a single smoother date.