Early Career
Born to a prominent family in Milford, Connecticut on February 13, 1933, Pond was named after his ancestor, the explorer Peter Pond. He described his childhood with his divorced father as "deprived of love" and said that this deprivation shaped his desire to help others. He attended The Rectory School and the Pomfret School, and graduated from Yale in 1954 with a degree in American Studies and, against his father's wishes, he entered Yale Divinity School in 1955.
As a divinity student at he flew to Hungary in 1956 to establish a camp for children displaced by the violence of the Hungarian Revolution. After graduating in 1960 he worked with impoverished children in Puerto Rico and in New England, in a program on gang violence run by the Indo-Chinese Advocacy Project. In order to raise additional funds for his programs, Pond worked as the Director for Resettlement at the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, as a consultant for Lutheran Social Services of New England, as a consultant for the Peace Corps in Colombia and Chile and for VISTA on Navajo reservations in the US.
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