The new Kingswood Community Center is officially open in Wilmington’s Riverside section.
The 81,000 square foot facility is about five times the size of Kingswood’s former home, allowing expanded access to education, health, recreation and community services.
The center features a gymnasium seating more than 600 as a basketball court, and up to 1,500 for a gathering.
There’s a large commercial kitchen and dining room as well as flexible community and event space.
Logan Herring is CEO of the WRK Group – responsible for managing the center. He says there are even more services at the Kingswood Community Center.
"So to be able to have a world-class early learning Academy, the Montessori Academy named after Ernie Webster, who's responsible for integrating services here at Kingswood, to having Nemours Children’s Health, taking 15, 000 square feet to provide a state of the art facility and world-class pediatric services, to have our empower team, to have recreation back here at the home of champions. To be in the middle of a larger redevelopment across the street from a park, across the street from over 700 units of mixed-income housing," said Herring.
He notes the Montessori Academy will serve 150-to-200 children.
Herring adds there will be an expanded Jimmy Jenkins Senior Center in a separate building across the street from the community center.
"We've been doing the work for 80 years, and so this is just an extension of the work,” said Herring. “It's going to allow us to do more to help build capacity. We have so many services we wanted this to be a one-stop shop. We wanted to inspire people with the beauty of the building. This is a $60 million investment in the Riverside neighborhood. A neighborhood that is so worthy of this investment."
The opening of the center comes during Kingswood's 80th anniversary.
