​DC Central Kitchen was established in 1989 to provide healthy meals through food recovery programs and a culinary arts training program. The beauty of the program was threefold: It provided direct and immediate assistance to feed people who needed it, reduced food waste from restaurants, and provided culinary job skills that would enable people to find good paying jobs in the hospitality industry. 
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In 2018, DC Central Kitchen partnered with the Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus (THEARC) to open a kitchen facility there as well as operate a café for the community while attending arts classes, or performances.  This created a new opportunity for DC Central Kitchen to provide another set of unique skills related to café operations and front of the house operations. As part of the facility there was a classroom to provide training and education to students.  Singleton Lodge #7, in seeing the critical job skills and unique opportunity that this facility offered, sponsored the classroom with its largest philanthropic gift in the history of the lodge.

The benefits of this partnership have been vast. It positively directly impacted the students using the classroom and had second and third impact through economic development.  This program also provided a model that will be replicated at the newly renovated Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library in downtown DC.