Our Story
Our organization is built on a story, so to introduce you to the organization, we need to introduce you to that story and the characters in it.
Some introductions…
Isaac was our first son. Born in October 1998 with a heart problem, he only lived for two months before we lost him on December 29th of that year.
Isaac’s Room is our effort to extend the family love and support that we would eagerly have given Isaac throughout his life to the young people in our community who have suffered from a shortage of it throughout theirs. Just as the room that Isaac was supposed to live in is physically empty and therefore available, the space we make in our lives for our own kids is now available through Isaac’s Room.
So IKE is a nickname for Isaac, the IKE Box and Isaac’s Downtown are the street names and “storefronts” of Isaac’s Room in the community. The IKE Box and Isaac’s Downtown are places where we look after each other and encourage each other to pursue our best life possible, just like we would have done for Isaac. It is, appropriately, like a family.
Our family tree has a lot of branches – we do concerts and coffee and event hospitality, we offer a life-development program called IKE Quest, and we are home to many other interesting groups and cool projects – but bringing it all together is this place in town called the IKE Box, named after this space in our lives, a creatively devoted space for fellowship and belonging one to another, a space we call Isaac’s Room.
We hope that when you walk into the IKE Box or Isaac’s Downtown, you can feel that you’re walking into a story. And we hope you walk in sometime soon.
Mark and Tiffany Bulgin
IKE’s Dad and Mom