More than a senior center: What national recognition means for Edward King House

Newport’s Edward King House is now one of about 300 senior centers nationwide to be accredited by the National Institute of Senior Centers, a recognition which Executive Director Carmela Geer said reflects the increased role the center has in the community as a whole.

“In the City of Newport, seniors make up about one-third of the population and that’s only going to grow as time goes on,” Edward King House Senior Center Executive Director Carmela Geer said. “We’re no longer just the place where people can connect, we’ve become the hub for all things senior-oriented. We tackle issues from housing and transportation all the way to nutrition and health care. There’s a lot more to us than there ever was before.”

Edward King House has served as a senior center and community hub for Newporters over the age of 50 since 1968. This month, the center announced it had finally received accreditation from the National Senior Center Standards of Excellence Program, the sole accreditation program for senior centers in the country.

This program, which is administered through the National Council on Aging’s National Institute of Senior Centers, evaluates senior centers based on nine standard principles: its mission and philosophy, work within the community, governance, administrative and human resource policies, program planning, self-evaluation process, fiscal management, record keeping and facilities. Only by meeting the standards for these principles set out by the institute does a senior center receive accreditation.

Geer said this new accreditation lends credibility to the center, which can help the center acquire grants and market itself, and also helps the organization maintain a high quality of care.

“It raises us up a couple of notches in the world of grant writing and grant funding and from a promotional and marketing point of view, it does make a difference…but the most important reason for us to engage in the process to begin with, was that from a strategic planning point of view, those nine domains we operate out of…every single year, we will go back to all of those functions and ensure that we’re continuing to dot those i’s and cross those t’s,” Greer said. “All of those things will be up to date, and so we’ll never be sleeping at the wheel. From a quality insurance perspective, utilizing that tool is really important to us.”

The organization has been seeking official accreditation for the past five years. The process would have taken just two or three years, Geer said, if it weren’t for the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Covid really ate up a big portion of time and we were in emergency response during that time period,” Geer said. “It kind of put us on hold.”

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The pandemic might have stalled progress on the center’s accreditation application process, but it came with a silver lining, according to Geer: It made people see the center not as a clubhouse, but as a community resource, which Geer said is a more modern, accurate reflection of what Edward King House, like other senior centers, has become.

“When Covid happened, we had the opportunity to not only serve the senior community, but we served the entire community,” Geer said. “We even assisted with vaccination clinics for the kids. All of a sudden now there was a better definition for what the senior center is capable of doing and what our role was for the community.”

Now that the center has received its accreditation, Geer said the organization can focus on its upcoming five-year plan and reevaluate and expand its programming. Recently, the center committed to helping the city’s school systems with the governor’s Learn365 afterschool program by providing volunteers to help with reading and creative writing.

“Seniors still feel like they’re the invisible population, that they just exist, but it’s so much more than that,” Geer said. “Sometimes I think if seniors knew exactly how powerful they were the whole world would turn upside down.”

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Edward King House in Newport earns national accreditation