Mel Hall, Candidate for Congress

Mel Hall was born and raised on his family's farm in Indiana. Growing up, Mel fed the calves and chickens, hung drywall, and worked with bricklayers. Mel’s father was a union carpenter before he started his own general contracting business; Mel’s mother kept the books for the family company. 

Mel graduated from Taylor University and then went to seminary. After graduation, he served as a Methodist minister in Detroit’s poorest and most densely-populated neighborhood. Mel knew that he wanted his life to make a difference.

Mel spent seven years as a minister. The church served as a community center, providing job training programs, legal aid clinics, senior citizen advocacy programs, and even a basketball league with Mel as the coach. To this day, Mel credits his time as a minister as the best education he’s ever received.

Mel then pursued a PhD in Data Science at Notre Dame and joined the South Bend-based patient survey firm Press Ganey as employee number 34. Mel worked his way up through the company before he was asked to run it. By the time he left Press Ganey, Mel had grown the company to employ more than 800 people.

At Press Ganey, Mel and his team focused on improving health care by giving voice to the one group of people they believed were often left out of the health care process: patients.