The Founding Charter of THE University of Hamilton Center

the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963 authorized states to establish federally supported community-based mental health treatment, and in the late 1950s Katherine Hamilton, a private citizen of west-central Indiana, began organizing local support for such treatment in response to the inadequacy of institutionalized care she had personally witnessed — an effort that, in 1967, was incorporated as the not-for-profit Katherine Hamilton Mental Health Center, and which opened its doors to the public in February 1971 at 620 8th Avenue, Terre Haute, Indiana [Sources 1–4];

Hamilton Center, Incorporated has, in the fifty-five years since that 1971 opening, grown into a regional behavioral health system operating in eleven Indiana counties with a workforce of more than 600 employees, while its corporate headquarters has remained at its original address in Terre Haute [Sources 4–5];

Melvin L. Burks joined Hamilton Center, Incorporated in 1979 as an evening front-desk receptionist and security officer while attending Indiana State University; was promoted to Security Supervisor in 1980; received nine total promotions across the following thirty-two years spanning facilities management, human resources, and administrative leadership; was named Executive Director of Administrative Services in 2004; and was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer of the Corporation in 2012 — a rise the Corporation's own published history and independent broadcast media have both documented as a distinguished, multi-decade career of public service within the single organization he now leads [Sources 7–9];

Melvin L. Burks was publicly recognized by the Terre Haute community in July 2023 for fifty years of service to the youth of Terre Haute through mentorship and coaching, an honor marked by a community gathering and the establishment of a scholarship in his name, and has separately been recognized for his leadership of the Corporation under the guiding principle of “Consumers 1st” [Sources 7, 9];

the Corporation, beginning in May 2020, undertook a multi-year effort to achieve designation as a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (“CCBHC”) — a federally defined model of comprehensive, integrated behavioral health care — an effort that included a $3.75 million federal expansion grant, the buildout of twenty-four-hour mobile crisis and assertive community treatment services, designation by the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration in 2024 as one of eight statewide CCBHC demonstration pilot sites serving forty-one counties, and formal CCBHC certification effective January 1, 2025 [Sources 10–14];

this CCBHC effort was led operationally by personnel who now also serve UH, including Art Fuller, publicly identified in the Corporation's own 2024 and 2025 announcements as the Corporation's “Chief of CCBHC,” demonstrating institutional experience, within the Corporation itself, in converting a multi-year regulatory and credentialing process into fully realized organizational transformation, under Mr. Burks's ultimate leadership [Sources 10, 13];

the Corporation's own dated public announcements document a sustained pattern of programmatic innovation across Mr. Burks's tenure as President and Chief Executive Officer, including the New Citizens Program, established in 2013 to provide individuals returning from incarceration with job training, employment, and a structured path to reintegration; the Military Veterans Program, connecting veterans to counseling, addiction services, and case management; and WIN Recovery, opened in Vigo County in 2018 as the first opioid treatment program of its kind in the county and expanded to Knox and Hendricks Counties in 2019 — each publicly credited by the Corporation as a product of Mr. Burks's leadership and his stated commitment to the principle of “Consumers 1st” [Sources 8, 18];

the Hamilton Center Foundation — a separate nonprofit corporation addressed in Article IV, Section 4.2 — was itself the product of sustained institutional commitment, its board having first convened in 2011 and received federal tax-exempt recognition in January 2014, retroactive to 2012; and whereas the Foundation's own dated public announcements credit the initiative to create it to the Hamilton Center Board of Directors and to the foresight of community donors, while separately and publicly acknowledging Mr. Burks's enthusiastic and sustained support for the effort [Sources 16–17];

the Corporation's and the Foundation's own, separately and independently filed IRS Form 990 returns — both public record — show that in the same fiscal year ending June 2014, the Foundation's net assets grew from $294,533 to $6,894,516, an increase of approximately $6.6 million, while the Corporation's own net assets fell by approximately $3.6 million notwithstanding reported operating net income of positive $3.35 million that fiscal year, an unexplained reduction of approximately $6.9 million outside ordinary operations — figures that closely approximate one another and are consistent with a single, decisive capitalizing transfer in excess of $6.6 million from the Corporation to the Foundation, occurring during Mr. Burks's tenure as President and Chief Executive Officer and in the same fiscal year the Foundation received its formal federal tax-exempt recognition [Sources 19–20];

Melvin L. Burks, in keeping with the documented pattern of institutional innovation recited above, is the Founder and lead visionary of THE University of Hamilton Center Incorporated, conceiving of UH as the next deliberate step in extending the Corporation's mission into formal education, and appointing Art Fuller as Founding Provost and Chief Adviser to execute that vision under his direction and on his behalf;

the Corporation has determined that the institutional knowledge, leadership philosophy, and demonstrated transformation capacity recited above constitute a sufficient and proper foundation for the establishment of a dedicated educational division, to be known as THE University of Hamilton Center Incorporated;