Invisible Infrastructure
It is almost trite now to talk about how the pandemic and 2020 changed things. For my co-founder, Maria, and I, it turned a lot about our business, INVANTI, on its head. We were built on a premise of gathering people in and to South Bend, working (literally) closely together to find ways that things could work better in cities like ours. And then in the course of a week, we went from spending our days in a physical space which felt so central to our business, to spending our days on Zoom.
We count ourselves lucky, as it seems we have charted a path for ourselves in this new world. But it has been a struggle to lose the sense of physicality that place once played in our work. Having a home at Vested Interest was a starting point for every conversation, an anchor and validation of our place here. We operated in a world where we were just as likely to be asked, “Where are you located?” as we were “What do you do?” At times since March 2020, the physical disruption has oftentimes translated into a feeling of being unmoored - what was INVANTI, if no longer so literally tied to a place?
I’ve thought a lot about this over the past few weeks in particular. Despite being neither celebrities or chefs, my co-founder Maria Gibbs and I were invited to participate in this year’s YMCA Greatest Chefs of Michiana event. I didn’t have a lot of context or connection to the Y locally, but was aware that they also have gone through their own disruption when it comes to physical space over the past year.
Out of curiosity, I started to look at the history of the YMCA in general, and in South Bend specifically. It was founded in 1844 in London and first showed up in South Bend in 1882. To give some context, that was 30 years after the Studebaker brothers started building their own wagons, and still decades before they started producing automobiles. In fact, the Studebaker brothers played a big role in those early days. Clem Studebaker was the first president of the local chapter, legend has it that the first meeting was held in JM Studebaker’s home, and the Studebaker Company donated the money to build the first Y building downtown, 20 years later in 1902.
The more I learned, the more I reflected on what really makes institutions enduring. This is an organization that has survived in South Bend for almost as long as we have been an incorporated city. It has outlasted its original leadership, and even the behemoth of a company that they had built. In terms of institutions, outside the City proper, Notre Dame, and maybe churches, it may be one of the oldest that still exists today. It has spanned three different centuries, navigating changes in technology, industry, culture, population, politics - and yes, location too.
And yet, in 2021, it is still here, albeit in a new form, in partnership with the O’Brien Center and the City of South Bend VPA. It has adapted at every point along the way - never dependent on any one person or any one building, yet always made up of specific people and always physically present. It serves 1,000 children and families in our community a year, yet this impact has never been due to the space it occupies. Its foundation doesn’t exist under a building, it exists in its mission to enable the youth in our community to achieve their potential, empower people of all ages to lead healthier lives, and strengthen the bonds of community.
One of the reasons I love reading West.SB pieces is the way that it often uses the physical makeup of our city to have a wider conversation about what makes up our community. As the literal landscape of our city changes by the day, and our relationship to those physical spaces morphs as well, I hope we all can continue to see and learn from the invisible infrastructure - organizations like the Y and the missions behind them - that thread our history and our future together.
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If you feel inclined to support the YMCA, you can donate by voting for our team here by October 15, 2021.