ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar 25, 2026--
Centurion Foundation, a charitable 501(c)(3) organization that works with health care, educational, and government institutions to cost effectively finance, build, and manage mission-critical facilities, announced that Roger Williams Memorial Center in Providence, R.I. and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital in North Providence, R.I., two essential safety-net hospitals previously at risk of closure, have been financially stabilized and returned to local, non-profit management.
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Painstakingly negotiated over the course of four years, Centurion advanced a bond-financed structure designed to recapitalize the hospitals and return them to non-profit status and local management. The two hospitals were previously owned by Prospect Medical Holdings, a Los Angeles-based private equity backed owner of hospital chains across the country that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2025, which put the Rhode Island hospitals at risk of imminent closure.
“This is a triumph by a non-profit organization over a private equity giant that secures jobs and critical healthcare services for patients and entire communities,” said Ben Mingle, chief executive officer of Centurion Foundation. “In partnership with the State of Rhode Island, Bank of America, the communities of Providence and North Providence, and the incredible doctors, nurses, and staff of both hospitals, we were able to secure the financing necessary to wrestle Roger Williams Medical Center and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital out of private equity control, creating an environment and foundation for long-term stability and growth.”
The path to achieving this outcome was neither easy nor certain, with considerable regulatory, political, legal, and financial hurdles. The final financing package included a complex structure totaling more than $100 million in privately financed bonds, along with an $18 million reserve fund from the State of Rhode Island.
“I am hard pressed to name another organization with the tenacity and resiliency to navigate a process as complex and lengthy as this,” said Mingle. “But we did, because we cared and because it was the right thing to do. We position other non-profits to better achieve their own charitable purposes. Now, the teams at Roger Williams Medical Center and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital can spend their time and effort where it belongs - providing excellent patient care - rather than worrying about whether the doors can stay open.”
The new non-profit entity organized as CharterCARE Health of Rhode Island (CHRI), guided by local governance and management, will oversee the governance and management of the hospitals. CHRI will comply with more than 80 conditions of regulatory approval, as mandated by the Rhode Island Attorney General and Department of Health. CharterCARE Health has an annual operating budget of $330 million, employs 2,400 health professionals, and has an affiliated medical staff comprised of more than 600 primary care and specialty providers.
About Centurion Foundation
Founded in 1996, Centurion Foundation has completed more than 40 transactions nationwide, totaling more than $2 billion across the healthcare, higher education, and government sectors. A charitable 501(c)(3) organization, Centurion’s mission is to help other non-profits achieve their charitable purpose through customized real estate acquisition, development, and financing solutions designed to improve operations, reduce the cost of occupancy, and free up capital for mission-critical work.
Roger Williams Memorial Center in Providence, Rhode Island
LONDON (AP) — A former cancer nurse who became a priest at the age of 40 was installed as archbishop of Canterbury on Wednesday, in a ceremony celebrating her election as the first woman to lead the Church of England.
Although Sarah Mullally, 63, formally became archbishop in January, Wednesday’s event marked the beginning of her public ministry as both the head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The communion is an association of independent churches, including the Episcopal Church in the U.S., that together have more than 100 million members.
“We walk with God – trusting that God walks with us. Trusting that in all that we face, in the sorrow and the challenges, as much as in the joy and the delight – we do not walk alone,'' Mullally said in her first sermon in the post. “There is hope because we are invited to trust that God will do a new thing."
The ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral was attended by Prince William, Princess Catherine, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and representatives from many of the communion’s 42 member churches. Representatives from the Vatican and the Orthodox church also attended.
In a nod to Mullally’s historic appointment, the service was held on the Feast of the Annunciation, which marks the moment Mary was told she had been chosen to be the mother of Jesus. It is a day on which the church says it celebrates “one of the great women of the Bible and thinks about how we can respond to God’s call.”
The celebration marks a major milestone for the Church of England, which traces its roots to the year 597, when the pope sent St. Augustine to Britain to convert the population to Christianity. He is now recognized as the first archbishop of Canterbury. The English church broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s, during the reign of King Henry VIII.
The church ordained its first female priests in 1994 and its first female bishop in 2015.
Mullally begins her tenure as archbishop at a difficult time for the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, whose members are deeply divided over issues such as the role of women and the treatment of LGBTQ+ people.
Mullally will also have to confront concerns that the church has failed to stamp out the sexual abuse scandals that have dogged it and caused strife for more than a decade.
Mullally replaces former Archbishop Justin Welby, who announced his resignation in November 2024, after he was criticized for failing to act decisively and tell police about allegations of physical and sexual abuse by a volunteer at a church-affiliated summer camp.
In an interview with the BBC this week, Mullally said the church was “seeking to become more trauma informed, listening to survivors and victims of abuse." She added that “light should be shone on all our actions, and the more senior we are, the more light should be shone.''
In her sermon, Mullally said she had "such hope'' for the church and considered ways big and small in which she found God in action.
"In the ordinary and extraordinary life of the church we see God’s hand at work — the Church rolling up its sleeves and getting stuck in, where God is already at work: in the local and the global,'' she said.
“The Church, through the ordinary lives of its people, contains so many extraordinary acts of love: God’s people, offering a listening ear, a word of encouragement, or prayer for healing; offering food and shelter, sanctuary and welcome; in a world that so often seeks to divide us, tables to sit at and conversations to be shared.”
Born in Woking, southwest of London in 1962, Mullally attended local schools and worked as a nurse in Britain’s National Health Service until she was named chief nursing officer for England at the age of 37, the youngest person ever to hold the post.
While still working in that job, she began training for the ministry.
She was named a bishop in 2015, becoming the fourth woman in the Church of England to reach that rank. Three years later, she was named bishop of London, one of the most prominent positions in the church.
The admission of women was not without controversy and some conservative churches have expressed disquiet about Mullally's installation. Archbishop Henry Ndukuba of the Church of Nigeria said her election to the role was “devastating” and insensitive “to the conviction of the majority of Anglicans who are unable to embrace female headship in the episcopate.”
But Wednesday focused on the joy of a new start, rather than longstanding disagreements.
Mullally remembered her life before the church, securing her ceremonial cloak with a clasp decorated by the buckle from the belt she wore as a nurse. Nurses and schoolchildren welcomed her after she knocked on the great cathedral's west door, symbolically seeking admission.
The service showed the Anglican Communion’s worldwide reach, with Archbishop Albert Chama of Zambia offering a prayer in the Bemba language and Bishop Alba Sally Sue Hernández García of Mexico providing a Bible reading in Spanish. The Kyrie prayer was sung in Urdu.
George Gross, an expert on theology and the monarchy at King’s College London, said Mullally's appointment instantly makes her one of the most recognized Christian figures in the world, alongside the pope.
“I think it’s huge, absolutely massive,” he told The Associated Press. “It matters because ... the stained glass ceiling is smashed. And that, in the world we’re in, when we talk of equality, (it's) hard to have that if you have unattainable positions.”
Members of the clergy ahead of the Enthronement Ceremony installing Dame Sarah Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, at Canterbury Cathedral, England, Wednesday March 25, 2026. (Jordan Pettit, Pool Photo via AP)
The Primates of the Anglican Communion arrive ahead of the Enthronement Ceremony installing Dame Sarah Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, at Canterbury Cathedral, England, Wednesday March 25, 2026. (Jordan Pettit, Pool Photo via AP)
Britain's Princess Kate and Prince William during the Enthronement Ceremony installing Dame Sarah Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, at Canterbury Cathedral, England, Wednesday March 25, 2026. (Jordan Pettitt, Pool Photo via AP)
The Archbishop of Canterbury Dame Sarah Mullally is greeted by local school children Brooke, Macanthony and Solomon, from John Wallis Academy in Ashford, representing the cathedral gatekeepers, during the Enthronement Ceremony installing Dame Sarah Mullally as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, at Canterbury Cathedral, England, Wednesday March 25, 2026. (Gareth Fuller, Pool Photo via AP)
Sarah Mullally, left, arrives for the Enthronement Ceremony installing her as archbishop of Canterbury in Canterbury, England, Wednesday, March 25, 2026, the first woman ever to lead the Church of England. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
The Archbishop of Canterbury Dame Sarah Mullally poses for a photo after an 87-mile pilgrimage from London to Canterbury Cathedral, in Canterbury, England, Sunday, March 22, 2026. (Gareth Fuller/PA via AP)
