South Bend, IN

For the final stop on our five city tour, Spotlight Michigan traveled to South Bend, Indiana to see how a fellow rust belt city was tackling the questions of talent attraction and entrepreneurship.

First, we stopped at the City of South Bend Office, where we spoke with Jeff Gibney, Executive Director of Community and Economic Development, and Don Inks, Director of Economic Development.  After speaking with them it became clear that South Bend has been spending a lot of time thinking about the same types of questions that we are asking in Lansing but that they are still only in the early stages of answering them.

The most important change that occurred in the last 5 years that spurred community redevelopment and an eye toward entrepreneurship was the University of Notre Dame’s decision to begin investing in the community.  For years the University of Notre Dame kept itself separate from the community of South Bend.  Students lived on campus and the university had special suburban neighborhoods for its faculty.  According to Jeff Gibney, Notre Dame began to realize that many of the top-rate professors were choosing to not come to the university because it was lacking a surrounding urban lifestyle.  This realization, along with a change in leadership at the university, led the university to begin investing its own money in urban redevelopment alongside the city.

The involvement of the University of Notre Dame with the City of South Bend has also led the city to turn an eye toward entrepreneurship.  Last fall, Notre Dame opened Innovation Park on campus as a business incubator.  As an extension to this park, the City of South Bend has invested a lot of money in clearing the land of unused manufacturing infrastructure to prepare it for Ignition Park, which is meant to be the landing place for businesses that have graduated from Innovation Park to build the manufacturing plants, warehouses, or offices, that they may need to continue to run their business in South Bend.

Later, we met with representatives of the Chamber of Commerce for South Bend and the surrounding St. Joseph County.  At the Chamber we met with Paul Laskowski, Interim President and CEO of the Chamber, Sheri Miller, and Ryan Fenstermaker.  The most interesting take away from this meeting was the focus of the Young Professionals Network (YPN) that is connected to the chamber.

The YPN does not focus on creating networks among the members to help them find jobs, and it has made a conscious decision not to do so.  The YPN instead focuses on professional development and getting its members invested in the community of South Bend by working to get them in leadership roles both in the business community and the political realm.  The chamber has worked hard to make it so that young professions can get positions on the boards of major employers.  Further, the YPN plans to hold events in the coming year that encourages its members to become involved in the political leadership of the community.  Fenstermaker, a young professional himself at 27 years of age, stated the goals of the YPN clearly when he said that he wanted to feel like he was part of the change that was happening in South Bend.

Overall, our visit to South Bend reminded us that to improve our community we all need to be involved with and feel invested in our community.  Part of this comes from university involvement in its surrounding communities, as we saw to be the case in Madison and Iowa City.  The other part is helping the young professionals in the area to feel like they have a stake in the community and can play a role in changing it.

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Friday March 12, 2010