The ongoing impact of COVID-19 and the resulting changes to daily routines has had a significant impact on families, particularly those with children with behavioral needs, Tammy Boucher ’06G of Waypoint says – many students have never attended an assembly or had a class with more than 10 students in it. Factoring in struggles to pay rent and bills as inflation has soared and the pressures social media puts on children, Boucher says mental health challenges are even more significant now than they were when the pandemic began in 2020.

Waypoint is a key nonprofit social service provider in Manchester, with staff on the front lines of that battle, working with an average of 9,000 children and families per year. UNH has partnered with Waypoint in a number of ways, including internship tracks in social work and nursing and the university’s Institute on Disability’s Building Futures Together program. The internship opportunities, in particular, have proven fruitful — of the 41 interns at Waypoint since 2019, 19 have been undergraduate or graduate students at UNH.

“The partnership has been invaluable. We feel really honored that they chose to visit us – the idea that they wanted to be in Manchester and meet with us is really important,” Borja Alvarez de Toledo, president and CEO of Waypoint, says. “And I think this is really the beginning of another conversation – one of the things we are doing is building the kind of partnership that is going to make the university better for the students and make us better as a social service agency that serves the community.”