The association and the advocates: organized families and citizens

1954 — Mental Health Awareness of Michiana from 2018

Beside the institutions stood the volunteers: The Mental Health Association of St. Joseph County belongs to the citizens' layer of the record — the layer that inspected, advocated, and educated while the county and the state provided the beds. The federal record dates the association's exemption to April 1954, the founding season of Indiana's state association as well; its local officers appear in the record across the decades — Shirley Siekmann Hamilton was its president in 1972, and Jesse L. Dickinson, the South Bend housing director, was a past president of the county association and chairman of the Regional Mental Health Planning Commission, the body charged in its era with planning the area's services. The association sat at the system's tables: in 1984, when Portage Manor's administrator rebuilt the home's community ties, the Mental Health Association — "MHA" in the county timeline's shorthand — was among the bodies she met with, alongside Logan Center, Goodwill, and the hospitals.

The family movement arrived as a second organization: the Alliance for the Mentally Ill, later the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness — documented here by the record of Ruth Bachrach Tulchinsky, a nurse of the Northern Indiana Children's Hospital in the 1950s who after her 1984 retirement became president of A.M.I. and a board member of the local NAMI chapter, working, in her Tribune obituary's words, "to achieve increased awareness as well as improved services for the mentally ill in our community." The association's present successor is a new founding rather than a continuation: Mental Health Awareness of Michiana, formed in 2018 — its federal filing gives the year of formation — co-founded by Heather Holleman and Lisa Kelly, and standing as an affiliate of Mental Health America.

Its own reporting gives its scale: it grew more than one and a half times between 2020 and 2022, serves St. Joseph, Elkhart, and Marshall counties, and works the advocacy side of the system — pro bono counseling access, a mental health fair, a summit, and the standing campaign against stigma — rather than the provision of beds. The layer's whole course is the companion to the institutions': in 1954 the citizens organized to press for care; by the 1980s the families of the ill organized beside them; and in the present system the advocacy function stands independent of every provider in this section.

Sources:

1. Internal Revenue Service exempt-organizations record, via the nonprofit directories — the Mental Health Association of St. Joseph County, Inc., its exemption dated April 1954; and Mental Health Awareness of Michiana Inc., Form 990 for tax year 2023 — year of formation 2018, South Bend, its mission stated in its own filing.
2. Biographical record of Shirley Siekmann Hamilton (Prabook) — president, Mental Health Association of St. Joseph County, 1972. Indiana University Honors and Awards, honoree record of Jesse L. Dickinson — past president of the St. Joseph County Mental Health Association and chairman of the Regional Mental Health Planning Commission.
3. St. Joseph County, "Historical timeline of the St. Joseph County Home" — the Mental Health Association among the bodies in regular meeting with the county home's administration in 1984.
4. Obituary of Ruth Bachrach Tulchinsky, South Bend Tribune, 1 April 2016, via the South Bend Area Genealogical Society — her nursing at the Northern Indiana Children's Hospital in the 1950s, and after 1984 her presidency of A.M.I. and board service with the local NAMI chapter, quoted as the obituary gives it.
5. Mental Health Awareness of Michiana — the five-year anniversary account (2023): its co-founders Heather Holleman and Lisa Kelly, its Mental Health America affiliation, and its first Community Conversations of 2019; and its 2022 annual report — growth of more than 1.5 times from 2020 to 2022 and service across St. Joseph, Elkhart, and Marshall counties.