---

They say if you build it, they will come. But for the Van Woert family, the opposite is true: if you come to Siena, that’s when the building begins.

Maura Van Woert, a sophomore at Siena College, returned from a spring-break service trip to South Carolina in March, helping to build a house with Habitat for Humanity. It’s no surprise she attended: her parents, Christopher and Maureen Van Woert, met thanks to a Habitat for Humanity trip at Siena College in 1996. 

As a student, Chris was so impressed with the work of Habitat for Humanity and the joy of the trip that he helped start an official Habitat for Humanity chapter at Siena. Almost 30 years later, the club is still going strong. 

“You’re picking up a life skill, and you’re helping someone start a life and giving them something they otherwise wouldn’t be able to provide,” Chris said. “Thinking about Siena’s Franciscan values, it’s full circle, and you leave there on a high.”

“My first Habitat trip was easily one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Maura said in a message to The Evangelist. “I made so many wonderful new friends and memories and it was an incredible experience. Waking up every day bright and early to give back and help a family in need in such a tremendous way was something that fills me with an overwhelming sense of pride.”

In his first trip, Chris and a crew of 12 students went to Hilton Head, S.C., where they razed an old house and salvaged the supplies to donate to Habitat. Students slept on the floor of a local church, which, despite how it sounds, was fun for the excitement of it all. 

That, in a nutshell, is a Habitat trip: you wouldn’t think a service trip filled with physical labor and constitution would be a joy, but every year, students go, and the camaraderie of it all and the laughs along the way make each trip an irreplaceable memory. 

Chris made lifelong friends from his trips, including the woman he would one day marry. How the two became connected is still told to this day: The two were friends on the trip already, but one night in Hilton Head, while sleeping on the church floor, Chris accidentally snagged Maureen’s pillow.

“The running joke became I stole her pillow and we fell in love,” Chris laughed. The two still joke about it occasionally, with Maureen even warning her daughter before leaving for her trip: Be careful who steals your pillow, because you just might marry him!

And while there was no pillow stealing this year, being able to carry on her parents’ tradition meant a lot to Maura: “Doing a trip that my parents did when they were my age was a really cool experience. Knowing that I’m able to tell that story and have that connection with them is so amazing and special to me.”

“We’ve always tried to instill the value of service to our community with our children, and we felt this would be a great way for Maura to make a difference in a powerful, personal and unique way,” Maureen said in an email to the Evangelist. “During and following the trip, it was wonderful to hear the enthusiasm Maura had for the work that she did, the sense of community and teamwork, the funny moments and time for reflection, as well as the friendships made and strengthened while she was there.”

The trips themselves have just as much of an emotional aspect as a physical one. Since Habitat requires each homeowner to put in a certain amount of sweat equity hours toward the home, student crews often work alongside the future homeowners, hammering nails and laying sheetrock together.

During his junior year trip, Chris remembers pouring concrete with the woman whose house they were building. 

“We’re literally laying the foundation for their future life,” he said. “We were working on two homes that were side-by-side that trip — pouring concrete for one and putting up sheetrock for another — so to know you’re standing in what is going to be their bedroom, or where their kids are going to put their head down at night, and to know I’m alongside you here doing this, there’s no better feeling.”

“I think a big lesson I learned from this trip was, as simple as it sounds, hard work pays off,” Maura said. “Putting in hours of work every day and getting to see the progress we made at the end was so overwhelming and beautiful, and it gave me a newfound sense of confidence in my own strength and abilities. Especially the strength part, we had to carry a lot of wood and hammer in a lot of nails, and that was tough!”

Helping start a club at Siena isn’t the first connection the Van Woerts have with the school. In fact, the first tie started back in the 1940s with Chris’ dad, Richard, a delivery man for Freihofer’s at the time, who would deliver bread with Chris’ grandfather to the college.

Richard would tell Chris stories of when he was a kid making deliveries, and every time he went to Siena, they would have a sandwich there ready for him: “They didn’t have much … and that always stuck with him.”

After that, the connections just kept coming: When Siena’s chapel burned in a fire in 1980, Chris’ dad was the one who rebuilt it. Chris, Class of 1998, was one of four Van Woert siblings to attend Siena. In August 2001, Chris and Maureen were married in the Siena Chapel, and in 2019, when Chris’ father passed away, they held his funeral there. His family placed a hammer on his casket during the service at the chapel “because it’s the house that he built,” Chris said. 

“Siena is just a place that’s very special in our family for a lot of reasons,” he continued, “and I think about how my nuclear family started at Siena: I met my wife there, my daughter is going there, and getting married there and burying dad there.”

Outside of Siena, the Van Woerts help coordinate local food drives and volunteer at area nursing homes. It’s that element of giving back — the one instilled in Chris by his parents — that he wants to pass to his children.

“I tell them all the time we’re doing the Lord’s work,” he said. “We’re providing for those who are less fortunate. We’ve been blessed and we need to share those blessings.”

And while a Habitat trip does bring about good works, it’s also important to remember the fun of it all: Chris recalls one night when the student crew dug a trench on the beach, covered it in blankets and slept outside, watching the sunrise the next day. 

“Imagine 15 college kids on a windy day in March on the Atlantic Ocean,” he laughed. “It’s stuff like that; it’s not all work. When I look back on those trips, I don’t think about swinging a hammer and sweating; I think about all the fun things.”

---