Michiana Shores Doesn't Have a Parks Department. It Has the Boosters.

If you've ever wondered who resurfaced the pickleball courts at Kincaid Park, who keeps the Bear sculpture looking presentable, or who decided a Little Free Library needed to go in near the swings, the answer isn't the town of Michiana Shores. It's a club.

Specifically, it's the Michiana Shores Park Boosters, a member-run nonprofit that started in 1982 as a support group for the town's newly formed Park Board and only became a formal 501(c)(3) organization in 2023. That's the part most residents don't clock until they've lived here a few summers: the town's own municipal footprint is small enough that almost everything you'd call "public life" here, the courts, the trail, the libraries, the party in the park every August, runs through a volunteer club with monthly meetings at the fire department.

The Town's Footprint Is Smaller Than You Think

Michiana Shores covers roughly 212 acres. Government-use land, the town garage and the fire station combined, takes up about 1.2 acres of that, according to public land-use records for the town. Parks and recreation land runs closer to 7.93 acres, more than six times the size of the town's entire formal government footprint. Street right-of-way alone eats up nearly 34 acres.

That gap matters more than it sounds like it should. A town this size isn't going to have a paid parks crew or a recreation department with a budget line for court resurfacing. The land exists. The upkeep doesn't happen unless someone volunteers to make it happen, and for more than forty years, that someone has been the Boosters.

The Club That Pays for What You Use

The Park Boosters' own description of their work reads less like a mission statement and more like an inventory. Their memberships and donations have funded, at various points, playground equipment at both Kincaid and Leeds Parks, the tennis and pickleball courts, swings and playsets, horseshoe pits, picnic tables, and repeated rounds of invasive species cleanup and natural area restoration. They also maintain the Bear sculpture and the entrance pillar on El Portal, and individual members personally adopt and manage flower beds around town.

Put plainly, if you've used it in Michiana Shores and it isn't a road or a beach, there's a decent chance the Boosters paid for it or are the reason it still works. One of their recent projects was the pickleball and tennis court grand reopening on July 5, 2025, which included a free clinic open to residents and families of all skill levels.

Membership doesn't require living here full time. The Boosters hold open board meetings on the fourth Monday of every month except December, starting at 7:00 pm Central at the Volunteer Fire Department community room. Anyone who wants to see how a town this size actually gets things done can walk in.

Two Libraries, No Card Required

Michiana Shores has two Little Free Libraries, and neither one came from a town budget meeting. The one at Kincaid Park went in during October 2022, donated by residents Andy and Karen Finn and installed by Steve Fetzer and Skip Moffo in what the town's own newsletter calls the classic Michiana Shores fieldstone style, matching the stonework you'll see elsewhere in the parks. A second library sits over on Dreamwold, credited to Lydia Gallas and covered in a September 2022 article in The Beacher about the small free libraries scattered around the area.

Neither library shows up on a map with hours or a phone number. You find them by walking the neighborhood, which is more or less the point.

The Trail Gets Weeded Every Spring, Not by the Town

The White Ditch Nature Trail runs in two sections through Michiana Shores, and it stays walkable because of an annual volunteer effort, not a parks maintenance contract. The town's Annual Town Clean Up Day tackles litter pickup along Old Grand Beach Road and El Portal Drive, weed pulling and tree trimming at the town center, power washing at Kincaid Park, and the physical removal of invasive Garlic Mustard along both sections of the trail and around the Kincaid Park parking area. A separate ongoing concern is Oriental Bittersweet, a vine that climbs and shades out native plants in the woods here.

This year's version of that effort was the Michiana Shores Spring Clean-up, held May 2, 2026, from 9 am to noon. Volunteers met at the firehouse at 911 El Portal Drive, grabbed gloves and rakes, and picked up short assignments around the parks, beach, and public areas. During past cleanups, traffic control along Old Grand Beach Road and El Portal Drive has come courtesy of Fire Chief Mark Swistek and officers Deputy Brandon Hugley and Deputy Matthew Disbrow, which tells you something about how small and cross-functional the whole operation is. The same handful of people show up whether the job is fighting invasive vines or directing cars around volunteers with rakes.

The Two Saturdays That Actually Matter

Ask a longtime resident what the real social calendar looks like here and two events tend to come up before anything official.

The summer town picnic at Kincaid Park is the bigger one. Past picnics have featured a lemonade stand, plenty of food, and, of course, pickleball on the courts the Boosters funded. In 2024, the Boosters used the picnic to unveil a permanent plaque honoring Joan Lewis, Dolly Millick, and Rich Young for their decades of work founding and sustaining both the Park Board and the Boosters themselves. It's the kind of recognition that only makes sense in a town small enough that everyone knows exactly whose work is being thanked.

The other fixture is the chili cook-off, a Boosters event where bragging rights matter more than the trophy. The most recent results posted on the Boosters' own site have Nick Sulkowski taking first place, with Joe Ukleja and Nick Payne close behind.

Neither event appears on a tourism calendar. Both happen because the same volunteer base that fixes the courts also organizes the parties that use them.

What This Actually Tells You About Living Here

None of this is dramatic. Nobody is fighting over zoning or fending off a developer. What it shows is a town where the gap between "government" and "community" is basically nonexistent, because the government is too small to fill that space on its own. The Park Board sets direction. The Fire Department shows up when needed. But the actual labor of maintaining shared space, weeding a trail, resurfacing a court, building a library box, throwing a picnic, falls to a nonprofit that anyone can join by showing up to a Monday meeting at the firehouse.

If you live here, that's worth knowing the next time you walk past the Bear sculpture or drop a book at the Kincaid Park library. Someone specific made that happen, and there's a decent chance you could meet them on the fourth Monday of next month.

For those thinking further down the road about property here or elsewhere along the Northwest Indiana lakeshore, Jordan Gallas has spent more than a decade working these communities block by block, from Michiana Shores to Long Beach and the rest of LaPorte County. Let's Connect whenever the time is right.