Everyone has their own story about why South Bend’s population declined, the most common being a lack of jobs. But the problem is not that South Bend lacks good-paying jobs—the problem is that its residents do not hold them.
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This week we welcome Kathy Burnette to South Bend on Purpose. Kathy is the owner of The Brain Lair, a bookstore in South Bend focused on developing empathy and building community with inclusive books.
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If you lived in South Bend during the 90s, it was easy to think that the city’s collapse had come and gone decades ago. But this was not true. In the year 2000, the worst was yet to come.
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Abigail Gillan opened The Ragamuffin Bakery in April of this year—an uncertain time, to say the least—and proceeded to sell out day after day. I visited on the shop’s one-month anniversary, and this is what I saw.
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We’re told that South Bend was doomed to decline when Studebaker closed its doors—but is that the whole story? Not at all.
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Over a 50 year period, South Bend lost a quarter of its population while the country’s population rose by over 40%. How? Every neighborhood in the city lost people.
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Introducing an article and podcast series by Joe Molnar that will explore the process of how South Bend, which had grown for nearly its entire 120-year existence up to 1960, began a half century of decline.
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Chuck Fry, Ryan Blaske, and I are teaming up to tell stories about South Bend and we’re exploring a new membership model to do it.
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Indiana Avenue was once the commercial heart of South Bend’s old Hungarian neighborhood. Today, it is a one-sided string of storefronts looking out over a vast field, at once echoing our city’s complicated past and pointing to a new, hopeful, fragile future.
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Heather Smith is a farmer in South Bend. Today, she tells the story of Golden Hour Flower Farm, her 16-bed micro urban farm in the Monroe Park neighborhood.
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One year since the murder of Eric Logan and just weeks since the murder of George Floyd, our city is in the streets calling for justice. This week, we listen to these calls at the largest protest of the month in downtown South Bend.
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We could go up on the tracks? is one of my favorite texts to send. This is a short film of what happens next.
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A list of stories curated by Belt Magazine editor Ryan Schnurr on the long history of racism and police violence in the Midwest—and what to do about it.
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Today, local painter Alex Ann Allen announced a raffle for her new piece titled George Floyd, with 100% of the proceeds going to Black Lives Matter South Bend.
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This week we welcome Jenny Casas to the podcast. Jenny is a reporter for New York Public Radio’s Narrative Unit who traveled to South Bend to reported on the story of Better Homes of South Bend: an early African American building co-op formed by Studebaker employees.
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This weekend, hundreds of people filled the streets of South Bend in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.
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Since moving closer to South Bend, long walks are becoming a part of Ryan Blaske’s routine. Today he shares photographs and reflections from one such walk.
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This week we welcome our friend Chuck Fry to the podcast to discuss his road to South Bend, how he learned to tell stories with film, why he got out of bed to start creating things during quarantine, and the internal battles that come with being a full-time artist.
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Today, fourteen regional musicians worked with South Bend Venues Parks and Arts to release a new music video featuring an arrangement of the late Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” with an original verse from Heyzeus, and production from Chuck Fry, Ryan Blaske, Eli Kahn, and Buddy Pearson.
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On this forty-fourth episode, we record remotely for the first time and are joined by Jason Miller, the founding pastor of South Bend City Church, for a long conversation about the state of belonging amid the pandemic.
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