Bound Together: 30 years of creating community

Once upon a time, in 1994, Lisa Uchno spurred fellow parishioners of Pontiac’s All Saints Episcopal Church to join her at Crofoot Elementary, right down the street, to offer tutoring assistance to students in grades 1-6.  The needs were real, and went beyond academic concerns to nutrition and relationship: in short, creating caring community.

In 1995, the program transitioned to All Saints as the program site with the encouragement of the Rev. Catherine Waynick, All Saint’s rector, who became the Bishop of the Diocese of Indianapolis in 1997. Then-seminarian Karen Lewis (now the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Lansing) was assigned by the diocese to All Saints for field work and took the tutoring program on, bringing skills in organizational development as well as relationships with the United Way and other non-profits.  It was during this time that services expanded to children and families throughout the city of Pontiac and added an evening meal. Rev. Karen found inspiration in an Episcopal collect that asks “. . . that both they and we, drawing nearer to you, may be bound together by your love. . .” – and so we became Bound Together, in deed and in word.

Deacon Barbara Fry Albers continued the leadership of Bound Together as the millenium approached, and deepened the commitments around food insecurity through her connections with Feed the Children. Bound Together became a non-profit 501 (c) 3 corporation in 1999, reaching out to include others from the community as board members and as tutors. As the years passed, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Rochester took on a leadership role in dinner preparation as the program evolved, adopting feeding as a lay ministry until 2018.

The board worked collaboratively with several directors following incorporation, with the much-loved “Ms. Jane”, Jane Porter, leading the organization from 2012 – 2019 and providing extraordinary leadership, stability, and structure. Jane loved our children and families, bolstering curriculum and fundraising and providing enriching opportunities for art and cooking – in general, leaving very big shoes for Michele Wogaman to attempt to fill just a few months before the pandemic hit. 

With the pandemic came shut-down on March 11, 2020, but within weeks Bound Together had partnered with Oakland Livingston Human Services to put dinner into car trunks as people lined up in the parking lot, not only for food but for a smile and the reassurance that we would see them next week.

This work continued through the summer of 2021, with groceries on site for the public but with deliveries to our BT families by faithful volunteers when we realized that lack of transportation made our kids more vulnerable – this during the Year of Zoom, when we kept 25 kids online with tutors who were more tech-savvy than they realized. We sponsored resource fairs in the parking lot, with drive-through services from mental health and car repair to art and COVID testing.  Bound Together anchored a cooperative Vacation Bible School at All Saints that summer, initiating social experiences for our kids and for kids in surrounding parishes as churches joined together to make things happen. In the fall of 2021 we added kids in grades 7-8 as we went back to in-person tutoring, knowing that, more than ever, we needed to hold our students close in order to get them into high school.

Pressing the restart after COVID, we went back into the kitchen for our kids once again in the fall of 2022, with another deacon at the helm – Deacon Patti Fraley from St. James-Birmingham, who has been joined by other faithful folks who make the mac and cheese, and all of those nuggets and tater tots, happen each evening. We put our toe in the water with some hands-on learning once again, and liked it so much that we rolled out FunDay Monday in October of 2023:  four Pontiac non-profits working with us to bring visual art, coding and robotics, biology/medical exploration, and sports of all kinds at the beginning of each week.  2024 also saw the opportunity to provide transportation for our families, with everyone getting a ride home each evening, as well as opening up a world of field trips.

Which brings us to the present, with an eye to a future that brings us new kids and new challenges each year.  We hope that, between these very brief lines, you can read the commitment of the parish at All Saints, the confidence that we derive from the support and encouragement of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan, the impact of the hours and hearts of hundreds of volunteers, and the focus on mission that our partners bring to the table every single day in countless ways. 

Thank you for making it possible for us to say to you, as we do to our kids and families: 

We are stronger when we are Bound Together.