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Why Support Our Work

Sign for Paul H. Douglas Center for Environmental Education at Indiana Dunes National Park with trees and a blue sky in the background. This sign is on Lake Street just one block north of downtown Miller Beach.
Woman wearing a white shirt and green pants, sitting in a wicker chair, reading a brochure about trails at Miller Beach, Indiana, featuring images and text about hiking, biking, and paddling locations.
Vibration Juice Bar includes a massage and wellness center with signs for yoga and Reiki. The building is painted blue and white with a small parking lot in front. Directly on the Lake Street Indiana Dunes History Trail.

Why Support Our Work

We are a volunteer-led organization working since 2017 with the mission of sharing the beauty of Gary's Miller Beach neighborhood and its role as the western gateway to Indiana Dunes National Park.

We’ve developed the only comprehensive destination portal for Gary's ecotourism destinations — connecting residents, day trippers, and overnight visitors to our beaches, trails, national park, and local businesses in the Miller Beach neighborhood. .

Although we are a national park gateway, we receive less than one percent of Indiana Dunes' four million annual visitors. Even as our beloved Miller Woods was the dedication site of the Indiana Dunes National Park. We have the most walkable and bikeable Indiana Dunes town, with a unique cluster of businesses, national park visitor center, beaches and trails, and Marquette Park’s outdoor recreation activities. This cluster is unmatched by other Indiana Dunes destinations. The opportunity is enormous — and awareness is the gap we are closing.

With funding from the Legacy Foundation, we are starting to blog about topics of interest here, such as: the Arts, Gary History, Environment and Sustainability, Outdoor Recreation, Architecture and Natural History, while highlighting non profits and businesses here.

Help Us Grow

We provide local small business listings on our website, where traffic increased by 75% in the last few years and continues to sustain interest into 2026. Our social media received over 1 million visits from fall of 2025 to fall of 2026.

List your business on our website, by contacting us at: info@visitmillerbeachgary.com or DM on our social media. Please provide your business name, logo or thumbnail photo, brief description, and link to your website or primary online social site.

Our event calendar lists local events on the Visit Miller Beach website's Event page. List your event in one easy step: create a Facebook event and cohost it to Visit Miller Beach. We'll accept your cohost, then your Event will appear on both the Visit Miller Beach facebook events and on our website event calendar.

Building great content and partnerships is driving awareness to Miller Beach as a destination, and to our local businesses business corridor.

Donate and be a “Friends of Lake Street”

Support efforts to bring events to downtown Lake Street, like the Cookie Walk, Halloween, Art Walks and more. It helps us manage outreach efforts, provide marketing materials, and support our efforts to maintain of street pole banners and lights.

Your support funds the events, and outreach that brings visitors through our doors and dollars into Gary's most active and revitalizing business corridor. Every contribution moves us closer to the thriving, visited, celebrated neighborhood we know Miller Beach to be.

We partner with the City of Gary, South Shore CVA, and Legacy Foundation’s NWI Thrive project continue to boost our reach and drive interest in our Miller Beach businesses.

Our relationships with Northern Indiana Regional Planning Commission (NIRPC), National Park Service (NPS), and the Gary Public Transportation Corp (GPTC) are essential to further building our efforts.

Help contribute by volunteering and donating.