A Chuckwagon Ministry

Letters to Ron, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Christian faith-based ministry registered in the State of Florida (Reg. CH82818). We are named after my son. The afterschool program — Bully's Promise — is named after a horse: bred at Adena Springs, sold for $9,000 to Eddie Kenneally and Homewrecker Racing as a 2-year-old, retired now into the work of teaching children what classrooms can't.

The thoroughbred world is not a backdrop to this work; it is part of its architecture. Horses require consistency, patience, and presence — the same qualities a justice-involved young person needs from anyone who claims to care. You cannot fake it with a 1,200-pound animal. You cannot manipulate a horse with pretty words.

What horses demand is what dignity-based diversion programming requires: showing up, doing the work, earning trust through action.

We are not theorizing equine therapy. We are teaching young people to work — to muck stalls before sunrise, to recognize labor in a mare at 2 AM, to prepare a yearling for OBS, to read a horse's mouth before it reads theirs. The horse industry already hires people with records when those people can do the work. We are training people to do the work.

The Lincoln Engraving

The ministry holds — by deed of gift — an original 1869 steel-plate engraving of Abraham Lincoln, executed by Henry Gugler from a painting by John H. Littlefield, who read law in Lincoln's office in Springfield. The plate took Gugler nearly three years to complete and was, at the time, the largest portrait ever engraved on steel. The likeness later became the basis for Lincoln's portrait on the United States five-dollar bill.

The engraving has been in my family roughly 120 years. It is now in the stewardship of Letters to Ron, Inc., where it will remain — because an organization built on the conviction that we do not throw people away should be willing to be measured against a man who said with malice toward none, with charity for all.

Who We Are

A quiet promise. A real restitution. A second chance.

Bully's Promise was started by a husband and wife who have spent their lives in two trades that are really the same trade: giving second chances. We are Tamara and Juan Rafael "Rafa" Alvarado. We live in Ocala. We built this so our community has a place to come back from harm — on either side of it.

Between us: brain-based teaching, ESE behavior expertise, bilingual reach into Ocala's Latino community, Montessori-trained classroom craft, bedside care, and a barn trade that has produced national champions. We use that toolbox to do one thing — build a quiet, real path back for anyone who has been hurt by bullying or has done the hurting.

Read the 12/12 Founders Page (PDF)

Built for survival. Built for legacy.

— Tamara von-Wedel Alvarado, M.S. Ed., LPN
Founder, Executive Director & Board Chair