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Title: A Life Spent Making Room: The Throughline in the Life and Work of Muriel Drake Ryan, PhD

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 10th Sep 2026 - In education, that meant helping to create a new school where none existed. As a minister to people experiencing homelessness, it meant opening shelters. As an author, it meant giving overlooked lives space on the page, from a Nativity innkeeper’s wife to nine people experiencing homelessness whose stories are rarely told. The theme runs through her work so consistently that it reads less like coincidence than a life’s organizing principle—one Ryan connects directly to Matthew 25:35–40: “I was a stranger, and ye took me in . . . Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (KJV).That principle first took shape in education. Ryan holds a BS from the University of Indianapolis, an MS from IUPUI, an EdS from Indiana University–Bloomington, and a PhD in Educational Administration and Policy Development from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, each earned with high academic honors. She served as a teacher, assistant principal, principal, and superintendent across Indiana, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Virginia. She also sat on a Minnesota state committee involved in approving the nation’s first charter schools in 1991. In 2004, she opened the Rural Community Academy charter school in Graysville, Indiana. At retirement, Ryan and her husband, Bernard Ryan, turned that philosophy into a full-time calling, founding the home-missions ministry Families by Choice in 2006. The organization opened Deborah’s House for mothers with school-age children, Timothy’s House for men, and Jonathan’s Home for individuals with cognitive difficulties—places of refuge for people who otherwise had few options. The ministry received public recognition in 2015, when Ryan...

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