The St. Paul’s Missionary Society is a group on campus that works with the school in giving back to our community and beyond. There has been speculation around the return of the MISH barn—the big red barn you pass by on your drive into campus right next to Hunt Field. The MISH barn was a shop where the donated clothes from our dorm’s MISH bins would be stored after being washed. The barn was a pillar of St. Paul’s community service life just a few years ago. Students could work for a couple of hours on a Sunday, and it would go towards completing their community service graduation credits, arguably one of the most important graduation requirements at St. Paul’s.
To find out more about the potential future of the MISH barn, I talked to Pierce Trevisani ‘25, one of the five St. Paul’s MISH officers. To Trevisani, MISH is “an opportunity and outlet for people to accomplish projects that need more support than just one person can give.” One of his favorite parts about being a MISH officer is seeing the real-time results of the community’s ideas for MISH.
The MISH heads meet consistently throughout the year, and the MISH barn has been a topic of conversation throughout the meetings this year. Trevisani touched on their inspiration for this idea being the “traditions inside and outside community service”- the MISH barn once brought St. Paul’s students together through our shared community service experiences. Trevisani said that in one of the last weeks of school, the MISH barn will, in fact, be reopening. Even if the MISH barn will be run differently compared to years past, if all goes well, the Missionary Society might just be able to find a place to permanently restore the ‘mission’ of the MISH barn.