In 1994, an initial donation from Mr. John Hazen White Sr. established the aims of the Center and allowed URI Faculty to develop a variety of outreach initiatives, including the provision of formal ethics training for a wide variety of state agencies and public employees,  a collaborative scholarly project that paired URI experts with stage agency leaders (the casebook Ethical Dilemmas in Public Administration), and workshops on the ethics of reference letter writing for URI faculty. The John Hazen White Sr. Center for Ethics and Public Service was approved as a permanent Center by the Faculty Senate in 2000.

Led by two of the Center’s co-founders, Professors Maureen Moakley and Alfred Killilea of the Political Science Department, the Center began to develop a new range of programs in the mid-to-late 2000s, when formal ethics training for state agencies was transferred to the Rhode Island Ethics Commission following an extensive restructuring of its mission and activities. During this period the Center redirected its efforts toward developing URI faculty-led projects locally and across the state, including the establishment of an Ethics Fellows Think Tank, a grant program for scholarly or creative work taking up issues in the practice of ethics, and support of community service learning experiences for URI undergraduates. 

The Center subsequently  invested heavily in two of those service learning opportunities, resulting in the ongoing Mentor-Tutor Internship (MTI) in Rhode Island public and charter schools as well as the original investments establishing the Music Mentoring Project in the South Kingstown public schools, which paired URI Music majors with low-income students for free music lessons as well as mentorship and creative encouragement. It also contributed to the URI in Cuba program by underwriting the cost of student stipends to participate in travel to that country as well as similar programs in the Dominican Republic.

During and in the emergent wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center has continued to direct its energies toward enduring initiatives at the heart of its mission while expanding in the direction of vibrant new endeavors on and beyond the URI campus as well as virtually. Emergent projects include a White paper on Public Service at URI, a new Awards program for staff, faculty and students engaged in public service, collaboration with the URI Office of Compliance on events for Ethics Month, curriculum development in ethics and public service, and ongoing ad hoc sponsorship of URI community innovations. The Center looks toward the continued growth of its signature initiatives as well as renewed investment in programs fostering the practice of both Ethics and Public Service as these impact the people of Rhode Island.