Across her career, Muriel Drake Ryan, PhD, has built her work around a single, recurring act: making room for people who had none.
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 and Families by Choice received a Jefferson Award for volunteerism in their local community.
That same perspective also shapes Ryan’s writing. Homeless I Have Known gives nine people she met through her ministry names, histories, and space on the page rather than reducing them to statistics. Her children’s book, The Innkeeper’s Wife, retells the Nativity through Hannah, the innkeeper’s wife who reluctantly makes room in the stable for Mary and Joseph—an act that takes on deeper significance as the story unfolds.
Ryan has also worked as a public speaker, adjunct professor, and radio host, co-hosting “Family Talk with the Ryans” on WRVA in Richmond, Virginia, for which she received a 1997 Community Service Media Award. Across education, ministry, writing, and broadcasting, Ryan has returned to the same conviction: people deserve to be seen, supported, and given a place to belong.
Homeless I Have Known and The Innkeeper’s Wife are available on Amazon and other major online bookstores.
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