Emergency responders learn side-by-side at MAAC Foundation’s Indiana campus
Visit the Multi Agency Academic Cooperation (MAAC) Foundation’s 30-acre training campus in northwestern Indiana, and you’ll see all manner of public safety professionals training, day and night.
Firefighters practice throwing ladders and putting out burning buildings. Police walk through car stops. SWAT teams rehearse entering locked residences, while armored vehicles push through the front door. Meanwhile, classrooms are filled with trainees studying investigation techniques, CPR, leadership and more.
“I like to call what we provide a sandbox for first responders,” explains Chief Stewart McMillan, founder of the MAAC Foundation, who began his 54-year volunteer firefighting career at the age of 14.
The emergency response disciplines—fire, police, EMS—must work together at the scene of a disaster, “yet they (usually) train on different campuses. It doesn't make sense,” he continues. “We provide a comprehensive training facility that is far in excess of what any one of them could have achieved on their own . . . and can show the results of how working together benefits everyone.”
Located in the city of Valparaiso, part of the Chicago metropolitan area, the MAAC campus includes 40 buildings, including a 7,000-square-fooot indoor training area and a four-story drill tower.
Several departments can train at the same time as each prop has its own set of tools and supplies. A 24,000-square-foot headquarters and classroom block are currently under construction.
“We are a unique organization,” Chief McMillan explains, noting the facility and use of equipment are provided free of charge to first responders from the five-county service area. “Typically, a training academy is associated with a particular force, and training never gets to be comprehensive because they just don't have the money.”
The veteran firefighter had the idea for the shared campus after seeing inadequate facilities everywhere he visited—more than 85 countries—as CEO of Task Force Tips, a worldwide manufacturer of firefighting equipment.
After McMillan sold his company, he donated funds to establish MAAC in 2016, specifically to help volunteer fire departments. To his knowledge, there’s only one other American training campus that welcomes first responders on a collective site.
As a non-profit foundation, MAAC relies on grants and donations to maintain the campus and ensure public safety professionals have access to current training equipment in a clean and well-maintained facility.
At Enbridge, nothing is more important than safety—in our operations, in our communities. To support MAAC’s one-of-a-kind training campus, we recently contributed a $10,000 grant from our Safe Community First Responder Program. We’re confident that the people living near our liquids and gas pipeline operations are in good hands with first responders from across America training at MAAC.
“By donating to MAAC, dozens and dozens of emergency response departments are receiving proper training,” Chief McMillan says, adding municipal training budgets are perennially challenged on a financial basis.
Although the facility was originally envisioned solely for the region’s forces, requests to use the facility have begun flowing in from across America—and beyond its borders. MAAC is developing a model to allow external groups to train at its facility and also generate revenue.
“We’ve had the FBI, CIA, Secret Service and Air Force PJs (pararescue jumpers) on the site,” Chief McMillan says. “It has gone so far beyond what I imagined. It's been gratifying to see the growth.”
He adds: “We hope it becomes a national model someday.”
