Belvedere Senior Housing celebrates becoming 2025 Malcolm Baldrige National Silver Quality Award winner with community gathering

Tuesday, August 12, was an afternoon filled with celebration at Belvedere Senior Housing in Merrillville. The senior living facility hosted a ceremonial gathering with its community to celebrate becoming a 2025 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winner. Belvedere Senior Housing was awarded with a Silver Quality Award for its outstanding contributions over the past year.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is the presidential honor for performance excellence of organizations in the United States. It recognizes organizations that demonstrate an exceptional performance in various sectors, including business, education, healthcare, and nonprofit.

Andrea Puente, Director of Marketing and Sales with Belvedere Senior Housing, is grateful for the community to be recognized on a national level.

“This award is all about our team being able to surpass the standard,” Puente said. “There were 37 communities in the state of Indiana who were awarded with the Silver Achievement Award this year, and we’re honored to be one of them. We are the only active Silver Award recipient assisted living community in all of Lake County! This means everything to us.”

The Silver Quality Award is presented annually by the American Healthcare Association and the National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL). This achievement is granted to long-term care providers that demonstrate outstanding performance and deliver exceptional service in their community.

Stephanie Westphal, Executive Director of Belvedere Senior Housing, has experienced the application process first-hand. For Westphal, this achievement has required a lot of hard work and input from her team.

“The application itself is written out and it took about three hours and three days a week, from August all the way through until January, to write the entire application,” Westphal said. “It was a team effort. There’s five different evaluators that look at your application. We’re thankful for the staff, Gardant Management Solutions who manages our community and supports us in all we do, and our Owner Zach Leonard who brought this building here in Merrillville.”

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is presented on a gold, silver, and bronze tier level. This marks the first time Belvedere Senior Housing has been awarded with a Silver Quality Award, albeit not the first time the organization has been recognized with one of these honors.

“The community is almost eight years old, and we’ve received the Bronze Quality Award twice in the past,” said Erin Tuttle, Senior Regional Director of Operations for Belvedere Senior Housing. “Becoming a recipient of the Silver Quality Award is the next step in this process for us.”

Moving forward, the next step for Belvedere Senior Housing is to level up in prestige to become a Gold Quality Award recipient.

“The Gold Quality Award is, quite literally, the gold standard when it comes to the quality of care that we provide,” Tuttle said. “I hope that our residents can see that these accolades, and all of the quality support that we want them to have, it’s all about how much they mean to us.”

Gardant Management Solutions is an organization that has worked with communities for the past 25 years, including Belvedere Senior Housing. Greg Echols, Co-CEO and half of senior leadership with Gardant Management Solutions, considers Belvedere Senior Housing to be one of the best senior living facilities that his team works with.

“We serve as a manager with a responsibility for supporting employees here in the community to make sure they have all the resources and awareness needed to do what they do,” Echols said. “I serve on the community team, and Gardant as a whole manages about 100 communities. We’re a large organization that is focused on supporting and providing the resources for this local team and for this Merrillville community to be successful in providing care to the seniors.”

Similar to Tuttle, the ultimate dream for Echols and his team would be to see this community take the next step and become a Gold Quality Award winner in the near future.

“It’s an extremely rare accomplishment,” Echols said. “The great thing about right now is that we have more Silver Quality Award winners for senior living this year than any other operator in the country. This facility has gone through being a bronze recipient, and now a silver recipient. Quality is something that is best described as a journey. In order to be recognized as a gold winner, you really have to commit to a long journey of quality and leadership, and this facility is working on doing just that.”

For a facility that was first opened in 2017, Belvedere Senior Housing has already made impressive strides and provides a quality senior living facility for residents of Merrillville and other Northwest Indiana communities. Becoming a 2025 Silver Quality Award recipient takes it to another level, and there’s no plans of stopping there. Belvedere Senior Housing was also a 2025 Best of The Region winner.

“I’m definitely just looking forward to celebrating with everybody,” Westphal said. “I’m extremely grateful that we were able to earn this award, and we’re going to continue to do this with the hope of becoming a gold recipient one day.”

For more information on Belvedere Senior Housing, you can visit its Facebook page.