Four crews of Siena students in the Habitat for Humanity Club traded their laptops for hammers and nails during spring break service trips to South Carolina.
Families in Marion County, Georgetown, Charleston, and Sea Island will now dwell in homes built by Saints through Habitat's Collegiate Challenge. Students were trained in basic carpentry skills upon their arrival and got to work immediately. In some cases, they worked alongside the families who would be living in the newly-constructed homes doing interior and exterior painting, installing baseboards, wrapping front posts with vinyl, constructing porches and stairs, and even raising the very walls of these houses.
Madisyn Molesky ’23 has been active as a Habitat volunteer at Siena since her freshman year and worked with her fellow Habitat executive board and advisor Judy Dougherty of the Franciscan Center for Service and Advocacy to organize the 52 students and where they would be working.
“I believe that if you have the ability to give back to others, you should exercise that ability to your fullest potential,” she said. “This was my second Habitat for Humanity spring break trip, and my first time leading the planning of anything like this. I am eternally grateful for the people and memories these trips have provided to our students."
Kiara Pierristil ’25 was with the Habitat team in Marion.
“This trip was a life changing experience,” she said. “Having the honor to help Mrs. T and build what will be her home alongside her was a humbling and beautiful experience. The people that I met and the ones who I went on the trip with made the experience all the more fulfilling.”
Thom Schlinck ’19, operations manager in SALD, chaperoned the Marion trip, and said their group quickly discovered that “Southern hospitality” is a real thing.
“We were blown away by the generosity of the groups that hosted and fed us,” he said. “Many of these students had never used a hammer or tasted grits, but by the end of the week we were all confidently using complex power tools and had fallen in love with the region and the people we had met.”
This was Schlinck’s seventh service trip taken through Siena; he’s gone both as a student and an employee.
“Every time, I am consistently impressed by how present our students are to the task at hand, the people we encounter, and each other,” he said. “These service trips carry an immense value for the students who participate: they learn new skills, enjoy a totally new and unique experience, and form new and authentic friendships with their classmates that will endure long after we return home.”
Yostina Henain ’26 said the hard physical work was challenging, but the bonds – and houses – built by the student workers will last a lifetime.
“The friendships didn't end when the trip did,” she said. “Nothing about the labor was easy, but when you realized who you were doing it for, and who you’re doing it with, you found yourself wishing you were doing it for more than a week.”
Tyler Munson '25 said his work in Georgetown “thrusted me outside my comfort zone and into something bigger than myself, and provided one of the most valuable virtues: perspective.”
