The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center,serving Newport County, is changing lives one person at a time by offering nutritional, cultural, educational, and social services for people of all ages and cultures. These programs, offered in a safe and caring environment, provide a lasting sense of well-being, self-worth, self-fulfillment, and personal growth.

Company Overview:

Incorporated in 1922 and renamed in honor of Dr. King in 1968, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center is perhaps Newport’s oldest grassroots organization, founded to meet the educational, recreational and social service needs of the citizens of Newport. Today’s Center can be described as a “one-stop shop”, with the area’s highest-volume food pantry and only daily meal site, plus a comprehensive roster of programs for children and youth from preschool to high school. Serving so many needs under one roof, the Center is able to help people efficiently and quickly get on the right path.

The Center is a place where we don’t just “give a person a fish”, we “teach a person to fish”. We help with people’s emergency needs around hunger while working with them to connect them to additional services both in the Center and around the community that they may need.

In addition to the hunger services we provide, we are committed to helping rewrite the story for children and families from challenging circumstances by providing high-quality academic environments for children from preschool to high school, and by creating opportunities for the development of leadership, scholarship and citizenship skills in our older kids and teens.

Our four goals are simple:

•Nobody goes to bed hungry.

•Every child enters kindergarten ready to succeed with superior literacy, early math and social skills.

•Every kid in grades K-12 keeps pace academically and developmentally – Nobody gets held back, and everybody graduates on time.

•Every teenager graduates with a plan and a path – knowledge and access – to a self-determined successful future.

Neighbors helping neighbors, engaged and excited learners, and new opportunities for people to interact with and value one another.

Every day someone's life is changed for the better.