Picture a summer evening at Victory Park: blankets spread across the lawn, a band warming up under the shell’s familiar curved roof, kids weaving between chairs while the sun goes down. Now picture that same evening for someone using a wheelchair, or a parent with a stroller, or a grandparent who needs a walker to get across the grass — for years, getting to a good spot to enjoy the music meant navigating uneven ground with no real path to follow.
The Victory Park Band Shell has been part of Albion’s identity since just before World War II, its façade carrying custom reliefs by sculptor Samuel Cashwan. But decades of weather had caught up with it — a leaking roof, crumbling concrete, and a lawn that welcomed some visitors more easily than others.
In 2023, the William and Karen Dobbins Family Foundation joined the Albion Community Foundation and CasterCares in support of Swingin’ at the Shell to fund a full renovation of the band shell and its grounds. The Foundation contributed $60,000 towards the $160,000 project. The Foundation’s investment supported regrading the band shell lawn, installing accessible sidewalks, repainting the shell’s structure, replacing the flat roof, and adding irrigation to keep the lawn healthy throughout the concert season.
The result is a band shell built to last another generation, and a lawn that finally works for everyone in it. New paths now run along both sides of the lawn down to the stage and around to the restrooms, with additional walkways crossing the grass itself — routes built for wheelchairs, walkers, strollers, and the kids’ bikes and scooters that always seem to show up on concert nights. The shell’s historic details were carefully preserved through the restoration rather than replaced, so the structure still looks like the one generations of Albion families remember.
Victory Park is one of the clearest examples of what the Dobbins Family Foundation means when it talks about being a changemaker rather than just a grantmaker. This wasn’t a grant that funded a single season of programming — it’s an investment in a piece of Albion’s institutional capital, one that will host concerts, gatherings, and community memory for decades to come. And it didn’t happen alone: it took three organizations pooling resources around a shared belief that a historic public space should belong to the whole community, not just the parts of it that can navigate a hill.
Priority area: Community Building · The Arts · Grant Year 2023 · Swingin’ at the Shell / Victory Park Band Shell