Key Takeaways
- Viola Davis and her husband, Julius Tennon, are donating $1.2 million through their Davis-Tennon Foundation to build the Mary Alice Davis Family Engagement Center, a new community hub in Central Falls, Rhode Island.
- Named for Davis’ mother, the center will expand an existing food pantry serving about 3,000 people a month and add a parent resource center, workforce and financial literacy programs, educational workshops, nonprofit meeting space, and the foundation’s headquarters.
- Drawing on her own upbringing in “abject poverty” in Central Falls, Davis says the project honors her mother’s belief in people and aims to give families visibility, opportunity, and a sense that their future is bigger than their circumstances.
Viola Davis is pouring $1.2 million into the Rhode Island community that helped raise her. The EGOT winner and her husband, actor Julius Tennon, made the donation through their Davis-Tennon Foundation to build a new community hub in Central Falls—the same city where Davis once faced crushing poverty, hunger, and unstable housing.
According to The Boston Globe, the Mary Alice Davis Family Engagement Center, named for Davis’ mother, will put a wide range of services under one roof. The facility will include an expanded food pantry, a parent resource center, workforce development and financial literacy programs, educational workshops, meeting space for nonprofits, and the foundation’s permanent headquarters. Its current food pantry already serves roughly 3,000 people every month.
“For me, this has always been about possibility,” Davis said in a statement. “Every person deserves to be seen. Every family deserves opportunity. Every child deserves to grow up believing their future is larger than their circumstances.”
Those circumstances were once Davis’ own. Born in South Carolina in 1965, she moved to Central Falls as a baby and spent much of her childhood in what she has described as “abject poverty.”
In her 2022 memoir, Finding Me, Davis recalled living in a condemned, rat-infested building that sometimes had no heat, gas, electricity, working toilets, or enough food. Her family relied on food stamps, but Davis wrote that they were “never enough to fully feed us.”
Central Falls also gave Davis her first glimpse of a bigger future. She has credited local teachers, mentors, and school theater programs with seeing her potential when she struggled to see it herself. Davis later graduated from Rhode Island College in 1988, sharpened her craft at Providence’s Trinity Repertory Company, and attended Juilliard.
Her Rhode Island roots followed her there: Davis has joked that instructors made her work relentlessly to shed her heavy regional accent, even though local words such as “bubblah” never completely disappeared from her vocabulary.
The center’s name makes the project even more personal. Davis said her mother “believed in people, even when life was difficult.”
She added, “Naming this Center in her honor is a tribute to her strength and a promise that we will continue investing in people and creating places where hope can grow.”
Tennon echoed that mission, saying, “When people have access to education, food, support, and one another, extraordinary things happen.”
The $1.2 million gift builds on years of work by the Davis-Tennon Foundation, which has supported Rhode Island organizations tackling hunger, housing instability, domestic violence, education, youth development, and community wellness.
