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The Pooled Afterlife: The Community Foundation
What it is: As in Fort Wayne, the largest single pool of private charitable wealth seated in South Bend today is not a family's account but a pooled institution: the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County, whose institutional history is told in the Charities and Nonprofits sections — including its founding-date conflict, between its own published "since its founding in 1992" and the May 1974 exemption date the federal record attaches to its own identification number, which this history prints unresolved there. The wealth that pooled there is sized by its own postings and filings: assets grown past $250 million, then $300 million, to $327.4 million in its latest compiled filings, with more than $100 million granted since inception — figures carried in the Charities section from the Foundation's own releases. The individual fortunes of Parts One through Three mostly did not end in such a pool; they ended in trusts, houses, bankruptcies, and gifts with names on them. The pooled foundation is where the smaller and later South Bend fortunes — the ones this section cannot size one by one — now collectively live, and its scale is the measure of all of them together.
Sources:
- Community Foundation of St. Joseph County — its own published text and filings as carried in the Charities section: "since its founding in 1992"; assets past $250 million and $300 million to $327.4 million; more than $100 million granted since inception.
- Internal Revenue Service exempt-organizations record (EIN 23-7365930), as carried in the Charities section — the May 1974 exemption date, printed in conflict with the Foundation's own 1992.