Irish Immigrant Leads Non-Profit in Indiana

In 1994, amid economic turmoil in Ireland, Aileac Deegan took a long shot and entered the diversity visa lottery, gambling on about a 1 in 45 chance of winning a U.S. green card. When she won, her family bought a house in Goshen, sight unseen, and her husband secured a construction job. "We were married, we had four kids and we kind of had been struggling,” she recalls. “Not struggling terribly, but still it was very hard to get on and work was difficult to get.”  

Adjusting to American life was a learning curve. “People worked longer hours and family time didn't seem to be as precious in Goshen,” Deegan says. “You didn't get much time off. That was a big shock for us.” The family was also politically liberal in a very conservative county. “That was hard,” she says, adding that the predominantly Mennonite, Amish and Protestant community welcomed the Deegans, who are Catholic. “The people around here are just wonderful, open, and accepting of us,” she says.   

Six years after the family’s arrival, Deegan’s husband got a job as a groundskeeper at Goshen College and Deegan, who was working as an administrative assistant, took advantage of the employee tuition assistance program to pursue a college degree, juggling school and full-time work at a nonprofit for six years. A year before graduating with a bachelor’s in social work, she became program director of Ryan's Place, which supports grieving children and families. “I think of Ryan's Place like a fifth child of mine,” Deegan says. “It's been a really important part of my life here and my husband volunteers there as well.”  

Deegan eventually received her master’s in social work. She also grew Ryan’s Place from a small-scale organization to one that serves more than 1,400 people across Elkhart, St. Joseph, and Kosciusko counties. She also recruited a robust force of volunteers, who donated over 7,500 hours to the organization last year.  

Looking back, Deegan credits Goshen’s welcoming atmosphere with her family’s success. “People were just so kind to us, kind to our children,” she says. “They got included in a lot of things because they were new to town, and there were even baskets of food on our doorstep when we came. I've been afforded opportunities here that I probably wouldn't have taken advantage of in Ireland.”