(gentle instrumental music) >> Robert: I am very proud of these people.

It has to be in the heart.

You have to want to do... You know, nobody here is doing it for notoriety.

We want to do it to serve the people that either live here or travel through our jurisdiction.

>> Tony: Sugarbelt Mead Fest is the world's largest mead focused festival that runs a lot like your traditional beer and wine festival that you are pretty familiar with around the country.

>> Mike: The feel we were going for was kind of like your friend's basement, right?

You're over at your friend's basement, hanging out, having a good time, very comfortable, kick your shoes off, you know, because it's just comforting.

You kind of feel at home here, and that's really what we're going for.

>> Jake: We go 65, 70 miles an hour and you think, "Oh, I do that on the highway," but I'm here to tell you, it's a completely different 70 miles an hour.

First of all, it's very loud.

You're strapped in extremely tight.

As far as the dirt goes, there's no windshield, so it's constantly hitting you in the face.

It's an adrenaline rush for sure.

>> Jack: The work of Project Neighbors is really important at Valpo, because lower income families are priced out of the area.

>> Paul: We basically can build for about 60% of what the market would charge.

This duplex we'll rent for a little more than half price of market and volunteers make that happen.

>> Narrator: Centier Bank is proud to serve hometown community banking across Indiana.

For over 128 years, Indiana's largest private family owned bank has been not for sale and promises to keep it that way for years to come.

>> Narrator 2: Doing as much as you can, as quickly as you can, is important to me.

Life is short, and the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

>> I have a very strong connection to other students.

Everyone makes an effort to help each other.

I'll remember the feeling of being here, the feeling that I was a part of a family.

(upbeat instrumental music) >> Narrator 3: Ivy Tech offers more than 70 programs with locations in Michigan City, La Porte and Valparaiso.

New classes start every few weeks.

Ivy Tech, higher education at the speed of life.

To get started, visit ivytech.edu.

>> Narrator 4: The Crossroads Chamber is transforming northwest Indiana's business landscape, one connection at a time.

Experience the power of networking within our diverse community, and forge lasting relationships that can drive your business forward.

>> Narrator 5: Additional support for Lakeshore Public Media and local programming is made possible by, viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle instrumental music) (serene instrumental music) >> Our primary coverage is Washington Township itself, which is 32 square miles, from 600 north down to Division Road, from 49 to the east to county line.

We do help cover all of Porter County.

Anywhere we get called, we go.

Everyone that's on this department, they don't get paid here, they are volunteers here.

Volunteering is, it's a calling, like anything else, it's a calling.

You want to do it, you have the time to do it.

It means a lot that we have the members we do have here.

We have 31 actual members on our department and they all devote time down here every week in all the calls that we do.

I'm very proud of these guys, these people.

It has to be right here.

It has to be in the heart.

You have to want to do it.

You know, nobody here is doing it for notoriety, not doing it for the public's acceptance.

We want to do it to serve the people that either live here or travel through our jurisdiction.

>> The department started in 1975.

We got the land free from the old Indiana General, that's down here at Evans and Two.

They donated the land for us to put a fire station.

I moved into the township back in 75.

Me and my wife.

And a bulletin was up there.

They wanted to start a volunteer fire... And I says, "I could try it, you know, see what it's like and all that."

And I signed up for it and you know, I've been on it for 49 years and I never thought, you know, that would ever happen.

But still from day one till now, I enjoy helping people, the community.

We go and we do what we have to do to get these people back to where they're at.

So the commitment, it has to be strong.

That's what we're here for.

It's just not our community, it's the whole county.

Meeting people that you helped over the years.

It's worth every minute that I've spent on the department to see people come and thank us for helping them.

(upbeat instrumental music) >> I think everybody here has a big heart, and they really just wanna help people, and that's the main foundation of it all.

So being able to volunteer and help those people in need and be a part of the community is really just what it's all about.

I think in a lot of communities, especially like the rural ones, it's really important, because a ton of the fire departments all over the state are volunteer.

There's way more volunteer fire departments than there are career fire departments.

So it's really a big deal, because otherwise communities might have to go without those resources.

My older brother was actually on the department, and I ended up just being with him a lot and ended up down here for a lot of calls, just sitting in the meeting room.

And then one day, chief just came up to me and was like, "Hey, you're gonna be here all the time.

You might as well join."

I mean, a lot of people would ask that, like, why you volunteer and don't get paid and spend all this time here, and I mean, it's just, again, it's kind of that passion.

It's just something I really like to do.

And I think it's just, I've been a part of this so long and it's just almost become like a part of me.

Like I just love doing what I do and I love helping those who need it and learning all the new skills, no matter what it is.

>> For me, and most of everybody on the department, it's knowing that you're able to provide a service to help people.

Not everybody has that opportunity to do it in their jobs, but we have an opportunity to help people, care for people, comfort 'em.

The drive in me was wanting to just be a fireman.

You know, the trucks, you know, the sirens and that.

But then as I got involved more, it became more of a passion that I'm doing something for the community.

I'm not doing it for myself.

There's times we get on a scene and we do something very nice for somebody.

They'll send us a thank you note or they'll tell us "Thank you" a hundred times before we leave, and I tell 'em, "That's what we train for, is to make sure that the public feels comfortable when we walk away."

(serene instrumental music) (upbeat instrumental music) >> Sugarbelt Mead Fest is the world's largest mead focused festival that runs a lot like your traditional beer and wine festival that you are pretty familiar with around the country.

Basis of the Mead Festival was to bring mead makers from around the country, commercial mead makers mostly, but also a lot of home brewers who wanted to participate and have shares and community with their fellow mead makers.

And we have commercial mead makers from California.

We have commercial mead makers from Baltimore, from Florida, from Michigan, Wisconsin, lots of different states.

This year we have just over 20 meaderies, and they all get to pour their best recipes for the attendees, and it's a three to four hour event.

Four hours if you have a VIP ticket, and three hours if you have a general admission ticket.

And it allows you to go around and take small little sample pours of different meads, which is a wine beverage, fermented with a majority of the fermentable sugars coming from honey.

But the basis of it was to bring a little focus in the commercial sense and pop culture for what mead is, considering it's the oldest known purposefully fermented alcoholic beverage, and still it hasn't really seen its rise in popularity and pop culture as much as we'd like.

So it's fun to have a mead only focused event, where people can come and get excited about it from around the country.

(upbeat instrumental music) >> It only happens once a year.

There's no other time or place I get to be around a bunch of people that are in the same boat as me, like brewery owners when I'm at beer fests, similar, but it's not the same.

Like everyone knows what beer is.

If I'm at a beer festival, half the questions are, tell me what mead is.

With so few meaderies, I mean, in the country, to get 20 plus together in one time is huge.

It shows a lot of camaraderie, and I know customers like cooperation rather than competition.

So I think it's huge for that.

Personally, I really like being around my peers, given that there's so few meaderies, I don't have a lot of places I can meet other meadery owners, mead makers, stuff like that.

>> This is our fourth year at Sugarbelt.

I love making mead and I love, you know, serving it and seeing people's reactions, but getting to meet so many different people from so many walks of life and folks that we've known, that we only see when we come here to Sugarbelt.

We see them once a year and they come up to our table, and we pour some mead and that's the best part.

It's always the people.

(upbeat instrumental music) >> And what we've decided to sponsor the last three years and then going into our fourth year is the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

So we do a lot of raffles and whatnot.

Raffle tickets and donations.

So we have a lot of the meaderies, we'll donate bottles, memberships.

We've had patrons donate amazing bottles of bourbon and wine and mead.

And then we do close out the festival at six o'clock, withdrawing those.

Each year, so far I think we've tabulated right around just over $20,000 in donations to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

So it really hits heartstrings with the community, and they've been very generous and kind of make a little bit of awareness go towards people who just need, you know, a little bit of talking to, a little friend that you need to check up on.

Really, we just want to bring something to northwest Indiana that people are proud of, and they can feel like, "Hey, look, we helped start the movement.

We helped nurture the movement, we helped bring it to light, we helped bring it into pop culture maybe a little bit more."

And this is where a lot of the roots, and not just in northwest Indiana, but like I said, the whole sugar belt area, the Michigan and the Wisconsin and Illinois, this whole area, Ohio, has just produced some great talent when it comes to the artisanal value of mead.

So we're just really proud of it.

And I'm happy not only for the camaraderie and the collaboration, but also for the consumer to be proud of something that came out of their area.

And they can probably look back on, as this industry grows, as one of the nice seeds that, you know, blossomed into a wonderful mead flour.

(upbeat instrumental music) >> The feel we were going for was kind of like your friend's basement, right?

You're over at your friend's basement, hanging out, having a good time, very comfortable, kick your shoes off, you know, because it's just comforting.

You kind of feel at home here, and that's really what we're going for.

In 2018, Munster High School was losing their sponsor for the eSports program.

So my wife had asked me if I would step up, because at that point my youngest child was this eighth grader, and she knew that he would really like the eSports program, and she was afraid if somebody didn't step up to take over the program, it would be lost.

When I took over, the club was about 25 to 30 kids.

December, we made the Fall State Finals down in Indianapolis for two of our teams, for the Rocket League team and the Overwatch team.

You know, we were stuck in the back of a Microsoft store, which was kind of cramped and crowded.

We need a venue, but nothing here in the northwest Indiana area.

I didn't know anything about eSports as an industry at that point.

I just had the exposure from the high school level.

So I started putting together some ideas and doing some research.

In January, 2020, I'm like, "All right, I'm gonna do this."

Started putting the plans together.

We all know what happened in March of 2020, so I'm very thankful I didn't pull the trigger, but I used that time of COVID when we were on lockdowns and stuff to fine tune my plan.

And then fall of 2021, my father passed away from COVID, and that's when the light bulb went off with me.

You know, he retired at 52 from the mill, started a couple businesses, they failed, but he took a chance, right?

And I said, I need to take a chance.

So I started putting things together, spring of 2022, I found this place, started putting things together, made it be what it is.

And we opened in March of 2023, we've been open a year, and I'm so glad I've done it.

(groovy music) With COVID, I feel it isolated a lot of people, like people just got stuck at home, brought a certain toxicity to gaming.

My goal is to kind of bring back the social aspect of gaming.

Get people in, playing together.

Even if you don't know people here, I do love when customers come in, and by the end of the night they're playing with other people they didn't know when they walked in, you know?

So it's growing the gaming, you know, community here in northwest Indiana.

The other aspect is the experience of like, you come in with a group of your friends, and you guys all sit down, you have a good time.

Yeah, you can do that at home, but you don't have necessarily four or five PlayStations at home for everybody to jump on, right?

And you don't have, you know, six or seven high-powered computers for everybody to jump on, you know?

Yeah, you may all jump on a Switch, and you can do that here as well.

Get four or five people on a Switch game, play, you know, "Mario Kart" or something like that.

But when I see customers playing like an online version of "Wreckfest" or "Overcooked 2," just the laughs and you know, the memories that you can... You know are being made just by the way they're all, you know, laughing and having a good time and screaming.

You know, as a human, it's great to see.

You know, it's bringing back that human interaction that is just, you know, more of what we need in this world.

(upbeat instrumental music) The youth today don't have a place that's safe, that they can go hang out on a Friday or Saturday night, right?

I wanna be that place.

I wanna be that welcoming place where they can just come hang out.

Even if they're not gaming, they can play on the retro consoles.

We have board games, you know, we try to offer enough here that kids can come just hang out.

You know, when I was growing up, we had the arcade at the mall.

We'd all go hang out there.

You can't do that now.

You know, the arcades are gone and the ones that do pop up are barcades, right?

So they're catering towards, you know, my generation or maybe a little bit younger, and center around the drinking thing.

We don't want to do that.

We want to stay family friendly.

We want parents to know if you drop your kid off here on a Saturday night, they're gonna be safe.

They're in a good environment.

You know, gamers are gonna be gaming, and you know, I do love when I come in and I see older gamers in their twenties, and they're just playing right beside teenagers and they're playing the same game, having a good time.

You know, 'cause gaming transcends all ages.

There's no like compartmentalizing of gamers.

Like, people just like to game, and everybody likes to have fun.

(upbeat instrumental music) (intense rock music) (engines roaring) >> We go 65, 70 miles an hour, and you think, "Oh, I do that on the highway," but I'm here to tell you, it's a completely different 70 miles an hour.

First of all, it's very loud.

You're strapped in extremely tight.

As far as the dirt goes, there's no windshield.

So it's constantly hitting you in the face.

(intense rock music) Close quarters, they say rubbing's racing.

It's an adrenaline rush for sure.

There's no experience like it.

There's a reason that we spend all this time and money on it, it's 'cause driving the car is the rush that we all look for.

The talent is incredible.

We're racing against guys that have been racing for 30 plus years and you know, they don't make mistakes and they're so good.

>> Announcer: Please welcome Jake Straka.

>> It's a lot harder than anybody thinks.

I went to a open practice in a four cylinder car out at Illiana Speedway, and I remember pulling onto the track being just extremely nervous, and I thought I was going really fast.

And then I didn't realize that we were still under yellow, we hadn't even started going yet, and I got passed by everybody about a hundred times, but I had a blast and I was hooked instantly.

It wasn't until the next year that we became pretty competitive.

Little by little you get more comfortable, you drive into the corner a little further, you brake a little later, you accelerate a little sooner.

You just pick up on that type of stuff.

Track conditions have a lot to do with it.

In a matter of 10 minutes, you have a drastically different track.

(gentle instrumental music) >> Well, we started at Southlake Speedway in Crown Point years ago, when Jake and his brother were small.

I mean his grandpa had been going there for 50 some years and that's how I started.

He got into it, we went almost every Saturday.

He always said he was gonna race and okay, kids always say, but he did.

And you know, he loves it.

A lot of people come for the first time and you know, they come back, 'cause it's... You can't beat dirt racing.

Jake started on black cop.

He went on dirt one time, and never raced on black cop again in his life.

>> I still get really nervous, and then I climb in and I go to staging, and then you sit in staging for sometimes 15 minutes or so, and you're just sitting there, just raring to go.

Heart's beating outta your chest.

But it's the strangest thing.

The second you drop onto the track, it all goes away way.

(intense rock music) Hi dad.

It's a unique experience and then after the race, it takes a little bit to come back down.

I know I definitely don't go to sleep early on Saturdays after the race.

I usually can't fall asleep right away.

I think if you run a heat race green to checkered, you're in the car for about two minutes, and the feature, you're probably in the car for, I don't know, five minutes, and then we work on this thing.

Some weeks, it's literally every night after work.

If nothing goes wrong, it's definitely still three, four nights.

Practically a whole another job if you want to be competitive.

Thankfully, Joe over here does a lot of the technical stuff.

We do have some sponsors, but most of the money's coming outta our pockets.

>> This is actually my third time here at the track.

My mom's friend, his name's Charles Boardman, the 07 car, he races here at Medaryville.

It was cool.

I actually got to sit in my friend's car.

It's a really fun time and you have a blast.

Sometimes you'll get the feeling that the racers get.

(upbeat instrumental music) >> This is a good place to come hang out and good eats and watch some good racing.

If you're interested at all in racing or your kids like it, bring 'em out on Saturday night, check it out.

>> Shadyhill, probably the most family friendly racetrack we go to.

Even if they're not race fans, I think they enjoy it, coming out a couple times a year.

(engine roaring) Racing is by far the most competitive thing I've ever done in my life.

It's crazy, it's fierce competition.

But when you're in the pits and you're in trouble or you need to park or you need help, the same guy that you were just racing door to door with, they'll help you out in a heartbeat.

My parents come out most nights.

My aunt and uncles come out most nights.

My brother's always there.

We're just fortunate to have the friendships and family that's not family that becomes family from racing.

(serene instrumental music) >> Project Neighbors was born in the late 1960s when a former Valparaiso University football coach by the name of Walt Reiner was teaching an urban studies class in Chicago, where suburban kids would go for a semester to learn about life in the city.

He was in conversation with a church secretary who had assisted in the programming of this educational effort.

She said, "I sure wish I could move to a nice little town like Valpo where my kids would be safe."

She had six children.

She was a single mom, lived in Cabrini Green.

He said, "You'd be crazy to move to Valparaiso," because at the time there was only one African American in Valpo, and that was a VU prof who I happened to know, 'cause I was a student at the time, and he was...

The only housing he could secure was to live in an abandoned sorority house that the university owned.

Well, Walt put together a group of colleagues who pooled their resources, and after not being able to rent or purchase a house, he happened to own an empty lot next to his own residence, and they built Barbara Cotton and her six children a house to live in.

Race is a central theme of the Project Neighbor's mission.

Barbara's extended family and friends all wanted to move after she did.

After seven or eight families had moved here, all African Americans, the organization diversified and basically asked these...

They were all single moms, "What else do you need?"

And they said, "Well, we need daycare so we can get jobs, and we need help with healthcare."

Out of that grew something called the Hilltop Neighborhood House, which is a state of the art daycare center, that runs a very robust scholarship program, and an organization called HealthLinc, which is now one of the largest community health centers in the state of Indiana.

All of it grew out of that expression of need some 25 years ago.

(gentle instrumental music) >> I've been here in Valpo probably 30 years, but if you look around, you don't see anybody building affordable houses, so this really fills the niche, I believe.

>> The work of Project Neighbors is really important at Valpo because lower income families are priced out of the area if it weren't for homes and low rent units so that they can afford to live here and find and fill a very important part of the job market.

(gentle instrumental music) >> We basically can build for about 60% of what the market would charge.

This duplex will rent for, about a little more than half price of market, and volunteers make that happen.

(gentle instrumental music) >> I would encourage anyone with even those skills to come here, because you learn a whole lot, and start doing your own projects on your own, because you have confidence.

I know I've gained a lot by working side by side with those experienced contractors and builders.

>> Well, it fills the calendar.

It gives you something to do.

I still like building.

I always liked constructing, so it's something constructive to do.

And being a volunteer, you could come out one day a week, two days, five days a week, whatever you want.

(gentle instrumental music) >> I'm 73 years old.

I was a school teacher for 10 years.

I ran a construction company for 25 years.

When I retired, I found a big hole in my life, so I can work at this every day of the week instead of just weekends.

My motivation is that it's meaningful work.

It's work with a purpose.

We enrich the culture, because we allow people of all stripes to live in town, and to live in town in very safe and comfortable housing.

That's a benefit.

We get to know what the real world is like.

It's a way of creating community, a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and I'm privileged to be the one to make that possible for people.

(gentle instrumental music) >> Narrator: Centier Bank is proud to serve hometown community banking across Indiana.

For over 128 years, Indiana's largest private family owned bank has been not for sale and promises to keep it that way for years to come.

>> Narrator 2: Doing as much as you can, as quickly as you can, is important to me.

Life is short and the earlier we get started helping our community, the better off our community will be.

>> Almost every single professor I've had, I'm on a first name basis.

By building that relationship with faculty, I was able to get involved with research.

It's one thing to read about an idea in a book versus physically doing it and seeing the results.

>> Narrator 3: Ivy Tech offers more than 70 programs with locations in Michigan City, La Porte, and Valparaiso.

New classes start every few weeks.

Ivy Tech, higher education at the speed of life.

To get started, visit ivytech.edu.

>> Narrator 4: The Crossroads Chamber is transforming northwest Indiana's business landscape, one connection at a time.

Experience the power of networking within our diverse community, and forge lasting relationships that can drive your business forward.

>> Narrator 5: Additional support for Lakeshore Public Media and local programming is made possible by, viewers like you.

Thank you.

(gentle instrumental music) (cheerful music) (gentle instrumental music)