Health: a hospital raised by subscription, a medical center's land given to a school, and a golf tournament's steady money

1894–2019

Epworth by subscription: South Bend's hospital philanthropy begins without a patron. In January 1894 the women's missionary societies of the city's Methodist Episcopal churches opened a three-bed hospital in a converted house — the Epworth Hospital and Training School, organized 28 May 1894 and incorporated 7 June 1894 — and the Hospitals section records that it grew by community subscription into the plant that in 1945 took the name Memorial Hospital of South Bend. No founding gift stands behind it; the founding gift was the subscription list itself, and the leg records the mechanism in place of a figure.

The land gift: The largest documented health gift in kind in this record moved a school, not a hospital. When Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center prepared to leave downtown South Bend for its new Mishawaka campus, it donated its downtown land for the new Saint Joseph High School — announced at Bishop John D'Arcy's press conference of November 2009, in the diocesan newspaper's account. The school's Forward in Faith campaign carried a 35 million dollar construction cost, with 22.8 million dollars raised by February 2011 toward the diocesan cash requirement; the new school, at 453 North Notre Dame Avenue, was dedicated on 25 August 2012. The campaign total is a collective figure and is printed as one; the land's value was not stated in the record reached, and no figure is attached to the gift. The medical center's own subsequent history stands in Mishawaka's record, not this city's; the gift of its South Bend ground is a South Bend fact and is printed here.

The tournament: Beacon Health System's documented donor channel of record is cumulative and modest beside these: the Four Winds Invitational golf tournament, sponsored by the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and its Four Winds Casinos, presented its proceeds to Beacon Children's Hospital yearly from 2012 — 127,500 dollars in 2019, for pediatric eye imaging equipment, bringing eight years of tournament proceeds to 672,500 dollars. It is printed labeled as cumulative fundraising, not a gift; the health system's foundation raised more than 9 million dollars in 2024 on its own account, a year's broad fundraising of the same character. No single seven-figure donor gift to either of the city's hospital systems documents in the record reached — the systems' great buildings, including Memorial's patient tower, are capital projects financed by the systems, and their costs appear in the Hospitals section as costs, not here as gifts.

Sources:

1. The Hospitals section of this history — the Epworth founding, its organization and incorporation dates, and its growth by subscription; the Beacon foundation's 2024 fundraising account.
2. Today's Catholic, the diocesan newspaper (November 2009; 13 February 2011; September 2012) — the medical center's land donation, the campaign figures, and the school's dedication.
3. Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and Four Winds Casinos announcement (2019) — the Invitational's proceeds of 127,500 dollars and the eight-year cumulative 672,500 dollars to Beacon Children's Hospital.