Our Audubon was founded in 1897 to halt the slaughter of birds used in the day's fashions. Today, our mission promotes environmental education, conservation and advocacy.

The Audubon connects you with nature all year through recreational and educational activities, emphasizing birds while encompassing all native wildlife and habitats.

The natural world is both sanctuary and classroom. Audubon encourages you to enjoy nature, learn from it, and protect it. Join us and experience the discoveries that nature offers you.

We are everyone in Newport who cares about improving bike friendliness, safety, access, courtesy, health, fitness, enterprise and planning.

There’s nothing that spells SUSTAINABILITY quite like bicycling. We sustain ourselves, our communities, our environment, our families and our finances. The more we bicycle the better we feel, the cleaner our air, the less congested our streets, the more productive our students and workers, and the happier our tourists.

City of Newport, Rhode Island

• Established: 1639
• Incorporated: 1784
• Form of government: Council and city manager.
• Council meetings: The second and fourth Wednesday of each month at 6:30 p.m., the board of license commissioners follows the council meeting.
• Fiscal year begins: July 1

Make history come alive for every member of your family. Just a short drive or a water taxi ride across Newport Harbor stands the largest coastal fortification in the United States. Visit this engineering and architectural masterpiece to see where the soldiers lived, enter the casemates, explore the tunnel system, and climb the bastions for breathtaking views. Consider renting the Fort with its 6-acre parade field or North lawn on the water for your special function. Watch for our upcoming special events including military reenactments, music festivals, and classic vehicle shows. From 1824 to 1950 Fort Adams housed generations of our soldiers, today it still stands ready for your enjoyment.

New England FarmWays is a special initiative of the Rhode Island Center for Agricultural Promotion and Education (RICAPE), established to make our farms and nature based sites in southern New England more visible and accessible to people of all ages and interests.

Newport Art Museum boasts a dynamic Education department with numerous programs including classes and workshops for youth and adults, week-long summer camps for kids, community-based programs and partnerships, homeschool at the Museum, family programs, rotating exhibitions, studio rentals, and an immersive career readiness program for high schoolers.

The Newport Art Museum School, housed in the Minnie & Jimmy Coleman Center for Creative Studies, presents a rare opportunity to learn art-making skills in the context of a museum and its community of art lovers and learners. Museum members receive a 15% discount on most of our courses and workshops.

Whether you are looking to kickstart your child’s lifelong engagement in the arts, learning a new skill yourself, or if you’re looking to enjoy the therapeutic qualities of creating your own artwork in a friendly atmosphere, we look forward to welcoming you into our School and Museum.

The Newport Historical Society was chartered in 1854 to collect and preserve books, manuscripts, and objects pertaining to Newport’s history. The Society’s collections originated thirty years earlier as the “Southern Cabinet” of the Rhode Island Historical Society. By 1853, several prominent Newporters recognized the need for a separate organization specifically devoted to preserving the history of Newport County, and the collections of the Southern Cabinet were reorganized under the auspices of the Newport Historical Society.

The first quarters of the Newport Historical Society were temporary. Meetings moved from member’s home to member’s home, and lectures were held in rented halls. By 1884, however, the Society was suffering from growing pains. It needed a permanent space to house its collections. After some deliberation, the Society purchased the old Seventh Day Baptist Meeting House (1730).

This was arguably their first real artifact, and certainly one of the first examples of adaptive reuse of an historic structure with deliberate homage to the structure’s own integrity. It is a responsibility the Newport Historical Society has taken seriously and managed well since 1884.

It did not take long for the Society to fill its new quarters. In 1884, they advertised that “The Newport Historical Society have taken possession of their new quarters on Barney Street and are soliciting donations of historical material relating to Newport.”

The influx of gifts was gratifying, but the membership soon realized there were untapped resources that the current building, surrounded as it was by stables, paint shops, and other fire hazards, could not safely accommodate. In 1887, the Society purchased a site on Touro Street and in the fall of that year moved its building there.

As the holdings of the Society continued to increase, the need for more space and security became evident. Ground was broken in 1902 for a brick library building on the Touro Street side of the lot. The new building provided office space for the Society, a fireproof vault for historic documents, and a library. In 1915, the meeting house was detached from the library and moved to the rear of the lot. A three story brick building was constructed between the library and the meeting house. Brick veneer, a slate roof, and steel shutters were added to the exterior of the meeting house to make its exterior covering consistent with the adjoining structures, and to provide added protection from the weather and the threat of fire.

The collections of the Newport Historical Society have continued to grow, and have, in fact, outgrown every structure provided for them within a decade or less of the ground-breaking. The result is one of the finest local historical society collections in New England. Its manuscripts, portraits, silver, furniture, decorative arts, and genealogical collection are nationally recognized.

The Newport Public Education Foundation (NPEF), established in 1991, is an independent, non-profit 501(c)(3) whose mission is to improve the performance of Newport public school children by enhancing their educational opportunities and by building broad-based community support for quality public education.

We have done this in the past by providing teachers with grants to enhance their classroom activities, assisting the Newport Public Schools in rallying volunteers to read in the classrooms under the BOLD (Books Open Life’s Doors) program, and leading the campaign to raise more than $1 million for furniture, equipment and technology to ensure overall program enhancements at Newport’s historically preserved and renovated Thompson Middle School. We plan to continue in this tradition and expand into programs that support our teachers, students and schools.

In response to the needs of our changing district, NPEF has recently updated its strategic direction. We will focus on five key ideas:

1. To support programs and services that address district-wide educational needs and enhance student learning
2. To foster community volunteerism in the schools
3. To encourage a community dialogue addressing school district-wide educational issues
4. To raise funds to support our current programs and to establish a strong financial foundation that will permit future expansion
5. To ensure broad community participation in the organization and to create an organizational structure optimizing execution of all goals.

This mission will be carried out by providing members of the community with services that will:

• assist them to continue to grow and learn throughout their lives whether enrolled in a formal program of instruction or not,
• provide the materials and programs needed to support their recreational reading and information needs,
• provide a means for residents to interact in the community and to participate in public discourse about community issues,
• provide information resources needed to answer their questions,
• enable members of the community to find, evaluate and use information effectively,
• assist people in their exploration of the cultural heritage of the community.

These services will be provided in a clean, comfortable and safe environment that will make members of the community proud of their library. Some key services will be made available online 24/7.

It fulfills its mission in the following ways:

• Being a leader in historic preservation in Newport County and Rhode Island
• Preserving a collection of the arts of cabinetmaking and building trades of the Newport region, along with art and artifacts from Doris Duke’s life in Newport
• Utilizing its collections for educational programs

Since its founding, the NRF has restored or preserved 83 buildings. Today, the NRF continues to own a collection of 76 historic buildings, including 71 homes that are rented as private residences and maintained by a full-time crew of carpenters and painters. This is one of the largest collections of period architecture owned by a single organization anywhere in the country. More importantly, the majority of these structures are being lived in and used as they have for more than three centuries, making them a vibrant part of the community.

The NRF also owns and operates three museum properties:

• Rough Point, Doris Duke’s Newport mansion
• Whitehorne House, featuring the Doris Duke Collection of 18th-century Newport Furniture
• Prescott Farm, an example of early American landscape and architecture

The NRF continues to be actively engaged in educational efforts, scholarly research and historic preservation.

The Redwood Library and Athenæum is the oldest lending library in America, and the oldest library building in continuous use in the country. Founded in 1747 by forty-six proprietors upon the principle of "having nothing in view but the good of mankind," its mission continues over 250 years later.

The Company of the Redwood Library was established in 1747 by Abraham Redwood and a group of his friends and associates. One of the country's earliest "public" libraries -- that is, open to the public though not "free"--Redwood is the oldest surviving lending library in the country. Redwood remains a "membership library" (open to the public) supported by Proprietors, who own shares and pay an annual assessment, and Subscribers, who pay fees. The Original Collection of 751 titles has grown to a collection numbering more than 160,000 volumes.