Written by Doug Goodnough
July is the wet season in Thailand. In fact, in the border town of Mae Sot where Erin Foley, ’05, lives, serves, and works, it hasn’t stopped raining for three weeks.
“I’m okay because I’m on higher ground, but the poorer communities live closer to the river, and it’s just completely overflowed,” she said of the conditions. “Our roads are muddy and slippery because nothing’s had a chance to dry out.”
Foley said that it is exceptional weather even for that region. However, that has not dampened her enthusiasm for serving the thousands of refugees from the people of Myanmar, a country bordering Thailand that is mired in poverty, war, and broken families. For more than a decade, she has been bringing hope, resources, and the Gospel to the people of Southeast Asia, including the last eight years in Myanmar.
As an employee of One Collective, a nonprofit Christian organization “that brings people together around the ways of Jesus to create lasting change,” Foley calls herself a “catalyst.”
“I work to bring people together to see broken families thrive, using family preservation to keep their children out of institutions and orphanages and instead putting them in families where they will be loved and maintain cultural identity,” she said.
The goal is also to give families access to the Gospel and support in growing kitchen and community gardens for food security and nutrition, as well as providing educational programs for youth and parents to develop holistic skill sets.
The daughter of missionaries who served in Mexico and South America, Foley said she was aware of global issues at an early age.
“I grew up in a family that was very aware of what was going on in the world,” she said. “I remember being 5 or 6 years old watching the Berlin Wall come down. My parents were in Youth With a Mission (YWAM) when I was little. We had people from all over the world coming and going. My heart has always been caring about poverty, caring about what’s happening with other nations.”
But the path to Myanmar and Southeast Asia was an unexpected and winding one. And the journey started when she enrolled as a student at Hillsdale College.
“I met a lot of students who really loved Jesus and lived like it, and I saw the difference in their lives,” Foley said. “I loved God, but I really didn’t like Christians when I first came to Hillsdale. But after a short time at Hillsdale, I thought, ‘Wow! These people not only believe this, but they live it.’”
She said she became especially close to dorm mother Carol Kelly, who tragically passed away from cancer during Foley’s senior year.
“She was someone who I spent a lot of time with,” Foley said of Kelly. “She didn’t talk about Jesus a whole lot, but her life just looked like Jesus, and she gave me unconditional love, which is something I really needed at that time in my life.”
After studying journalism, Foley settled on a fine arts major. Following graduation, she took a job in the corporate world and moved to Idaho, where she was intent on paying down college debt and “getting my feet on the ground.” However, the call of becoming a missionary became too strong to ignore.
She considered teaching in a private school in Idaho and thought she could spend her summers performing missions work.
“But I felt like the Lord was saying, ‘No, I actually want all of you. I don’t want a few months of your time,’” Foley recalled. “So I prayed and fasted, and I just kept getting the word ‘Australia’ over and over again.”
In January of 2011, she joined the Youth With A Mission organization in Australia and completed discipleship training. Her first assignment was handling communications and media for a medical ship that served Papua New Guinea, one of the most remote and impoverished countries in the world.
In 2014, Foley received a call to another part of the world: Southeast Asia. Her assignment was to work with anti-human trafficking organizations in Cambodia, specifically providing training and jobs to women who were coming out of sex work.
For a variety of reasons, she called it “the worst experience of my life.”
“I was also having a major health crisis,” Foley said. “My first year-and-a-half in Cambodia was a nightmare. I hated the country. I hated everything about it. I just wanted to be out. But I felt like the Lord was not releasing me and He wouldn’t let me leave.”
She eventually found the Children in Families (CIF) organization and accepted a position with a new focus.
“This is an organization that does family preservation, keeping kids out of institutions and orphanages and in family through foster care, kinship care, and emergency care,” Foley said.
In 2016, Foley took a year off from the mission field and returned to Australia to do an intensive study of the Bible. She said it was the foundation she needed to refocus her faith.
“It was so much homework and studying. It was six days a week, 12 hours a day of studying,” she said. “You read through every book of the Bible multiple times in different ways. I really felt like the Lord healed me a lot in that time as well.”
He also gave her a new destination: Myanmar.
“God was really speaking to me about the Buddhist world,” she said. “God came to redeem those cultures, but He wants to do it culturally, like through teaching them how to study the Word for themselves and apply it within their own cultural context.”
Foley went to India, where she and a team led Bible studies at a church plant in the northern region close to Tibet, which has been oppressed by China for many years. While in India, Foley received an email from a colleague who said they were looking for Bible teachers in Myanmar.
“I had never been there,” she said of the war-torn country. “I knew the country had been under brutal regimes for a long time. So I was really cautious. And I remember being terrified because I was going there by myself. I don’t know who these people are, but I really felt like God opened the door.”
She taught for three years at Shiloh Bible College in Mandalay, the second largest city in Myanmar. For a month every year from 2017-19, Foley taught students from the region and focused on the book of Philemon, one of the Bible’s shorter books.
“It was not teaching them theology or anything. It was just teaching them how to study the Bible,” she said. “I really, really loved it.”
After her classes were finished, she returned to Cambodia where she continued her work with Children in Families. But she really wanted to live in Myanmar and eventually received a visa and position with another organization so she could move there. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and she was forced to stay in Cambodia.
In February of 2021, a military coup broke out in Myanmar, shutting out visitors while a civil war raged. Foley moved near the Myanmar/Thailand border, where she is currently serving the thousands of refugees who have escaped the fighting.
“A lot of the people who are fleeing Myanmar are coming across over here,” she said of the largest refugee camp in Mae Sot. “I’m going to serve. If you can’t be there, you can serve the people who are coming from there.”
As a “catalyst,” Foley is building relationships with a lot of different organizations and helping empower them to take ownership of projects such as small-scale sustainable farming.
She recently authored a book, Where They Belong, about family-based care.
“I interviewed experts from all over the world,” said Foley, who used her time during the COVID-19 pandemic to work on the book. “I was able to meet people who work in this field globally. It was phenomenal.”
Foley said she appreciates her Hillsdale education.
“I’m extremely proud to have attended Hillsdale,” said Foley, who attended the College’s White & Blue Weekend in June. “I’m grateful to say that I’m a grad. And I’m amazed at how many people know about it. I can be on the other side of the world, and people say, ‘You went to Hillsdale?’ The name still carries a lot of clout with it.”
Doug Goodnough, ’90, is Hillsdale’s senior director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.
Published in September 2025
