Project Happy promotes youth volunteerism in Manchester

Co-founders Jack Potvin and Gerry receive third place in the P.J. Holloway Prize competition at the University of New Hampshire, their alma mater. (Courtesy of Project Happy)

Visions for some are built on past experiences. For Jack Potvin, those experiences were volunteer opportunities in his teenage years — at least, the ones open to him.

“There was no platform for young people to find opportunities, specifically for people under 18,” he recalled. “So many nonprofits I used to call when I was in high school were like, ‘No, you’re 18. You know you can’t, right?’”

Compounded with that, Potvin said his friends didn’t know how to find the right volunteer programs for them, or didn’t see the same value in this work that Potvin did.

These factors kept Potvin stewing through college at the University of New Hampshire about how to make volunteering not only more accessible to kids like himself but also how to show his peers that it can be fun and gratifying to step up in their community.

His vision materialized into Project Happy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that he co-founded, which collaborates with other Manchester-area nonprofits to connect grade schoolers and college students to youth-friendly volunteer opportunities.

Those connections are facilitated through a phone app. There, students can seek out local organizations that share information about when and where they will have service times for volunteers, including the duration, any age requirements and how many spots are free. They can also tailor the app to specific criteria that matter to them.

More than just listing volunteer outings, the app also displays the total number of hours students have served since using it, as well as the number of organizations they’ve volunteered with.

“If you can gamify doing good, make it easy, fun and super low-friction for young people, you can modernize Gen Z upon service. Then, more people will volunteer,” Potvin said. “So far, we’ve seen that’s true.”

Students in West High School’s football team volunteer to clean up Piscataquog River Park in Manchester after finding the opportunity through Project Happy. (Courtesy of Project Happy)

During the development of Project Happy, Potvin contacted Jay Lucas, the Republican nominee for governor in New Hampshire’s 1998 gubernatorial election. Today, Lucas owns the Eagle-Times newspaper in Claremont, is president of his consulting firm, The Lucas Group, and is a managing partner with LB Private Equity. However, he also founded an initiative he named the American Sunshine Movement in 2018, spurring Potvin to connect.

Lucas’ American Sunshine Movement aims to help downtrodden small-town communities across the U.S. access resources and programs for municipal revitalization. In tandem with this is an inspirational effort that the initiative is leading to plant sunshine seeds in more than 1,000 communities by 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence (known as the United States Semiquincentennial).

Lucas said the development of his movement came as he sought to spearhead the revitalization of his hometown of Newport after witnessing the town hit hard times late in his youth.

“One of the big old textile mills closed down after a couple of other mills closed down, and soon, we had pretty significant unemployment,” Lucas said. “Seven years ago, my wife and I were in town, and it just hit me on this one drive up the main street where I said, ‘These storefronts that used to be so beautiful are either boarded up, closed or second-hand stores.’ That was not the same town anymore I grew up in, and I wanted to change that.”

With that, the movement took shape in its first community as Lucas began holding meetings to revive and modernize Newport’s economic health. Today, Lucas said he’s proud to see the town recently open a new $10 million community center and is eager about the redevelopment of a mill building that will soon house 70 apartments. He also highlighted renovations of the Newport Opera House and the introduction of a robotics program at the local high school as other achievements.

It was this spirit that led Lucas and Potvin to partner on Project Happy, of which Lucas is chair of the board. He said his American Sunshine Movement shares values with Potvin’s nonprofit.

“The more and more I got involved in understanding Project Happy, I was truly enthused by it,” Lucas said. “Not only does (American Sunshine) want to revitalize towns, but a critical part of that is getting young people engaged in the effort.”

Last year, the two partners decided to incorporate Project Happy into the American Sunshine Movement’s work in New Hampshire, as they aspire to expand Project Happy’s work to other parts of the Granite State.

At this stage, Project Happy has mobilized more than 750 high schoolers in Greater Manchester to lend their time, working with over 45 nonprofits, according to an April news release. Potvin added that his organization has partnered with the New Hampshire Department of Education to enable the app’s use in public and private high schools.

“(Students) can go through and select their school, they sign up and there’s a mandatory care permission form that gets signed digitally, a state requirement,” he said. “Once they have that signed, a parent signs off. … Then for college applications, class requirements or whatever else, (the app) digitally tracks and verifies those.”

He says that Project Happy’s integration within local education has been possible, in no small part, due to Manchester Proud, which has served as the networking glue for the organization over the past few years.

Manchester Proud is a coalition of stakeholders of the Manchester School District, like teachers, parents, businesses and civic leaders, who work with district officials to achieve positive learning outcomes for students. Executive Director Aimee Kereage says that’s done through listing resources available in the area, hosting community engagement events and creating communication channels between the district and other parties.

“I met with Jack almost three years ago because they were very interested in partnering with the district — the largest in the state,” Kereage said. “More recently, within the past six to eight months (of April), we’ve been helping to work with the district as he was meeting with Mayor Jay Ruais.”

Manchester Proud has also worked to provide volunteers for events Project Happy hosts with its partners like Make-A-Wish New Hampshire, Kereage said. That goes both ways, with Project Happy’s student volunteers assisting Manchester Proud with its own spring and summer programming.

“We really see ourselves as a connector in the community, I always say; it’s kind of our magical power,” she said. “I think with Project Happy we go hand-in-hand.”

Potvin’s meeting with Ruais, which Kereage referenced, marked the start of what he and the Project Happy team call the Manchester Youth Service Movement — an initiative between the nonprofit and the City of Manchester aimed at boosting youth volunteerism.

The movement’s goal for teens is straightforward, yet involved: to achieve 5,000 hours of logged service by the end of the school year, which was June 17 this year in the Manchester School District. Each high school was individually targeted to achieve between 500 and 1,000 service hours across its total student population, according to the news release.

Potvin said the idea for the initiative was born in a “meeting of the minds” at the Manchester Boys & Girls Club in February, wherein he met with community leaders like Ruais, Andy Chappell of The Derryfield School, Rick Dichard of Manchester High School West, and Manchester School of Technology’s Tim Otis.

“I said, ‘Let’s get together and talk about what we can do to make service a priority,’” Potvin recalled.

The 2025 drive wrapped up in mid-June, with a group of student ambassadors from Manchester’s five schools representing their peers at a celebration with Ruais and Manchester Proud officials, Potvin said more recently.

“(With) thousands of hours of service, over 40 Manchester nonprofits have met a youth volunteer, and (we) successfully had our first cohort of students complete our innovative Project Happy service course-to-credit pathway,” Potvin wrote in an email to NH Business Review. “That’s an achievement I’m particularly proud of (that) could truly become a statewide model for service learning done right.”

But the effort will ultimately culminate in October. That’s when 4,000 students from across the Queen City will converge on SNHU Arena for a service awards event where students will receive honors and scholarships in recognition of their volunteer work.

It’s a show of gratitude from the nonprofits and city Potvin says he hopes can motivate youth to stay engaged with volunteerism, even when there’s no goal attached.

“It’s been so cool to help nonprofit leaders,” he said. “They want to create awesome experiences for young people, because it’s been so hard for them to get young people involved.”