Improvements to the Owensville Senior Center’s restrooms and parking lot are planned using funding from the Community Foundation of the Ozarks (CFO) and the Louis L. and Julia Dorothy Coover Charitable Foundation.

The CFO recently presented a $14,656 grant to the Owensville Senior Center to create safer restrooms and much-needed improvements to the site’s parking lot, according to a release from the foundation.

“Our objective was to make our bathrooms safer for the seniors,” said Sharon Nowack, manager of the Owensville Senior Center. Nowack noted that plans call for installing touchless features in the restrooms, as well as other improvements.

“Our parking lot really needs to be redone,” she said. “We had to replace some gravel and dug a hole in it, so we need new pavement to make it safer.”

The grant, one of 18 awarded for the Coover Regional Senior Center Support Grant Program that totaled $261,777, was presented during an April 19 ceremony at Commerce Trust Company in Springfield. The CFO administers grantmaking for the Coover Charitable Foundation, which is managed by Commerce Trust Company.

This year, the annual Coover Regional grant program focused on proposals to improve senior centers after the COVID-19 pandemic led many to close for significant periods of time or drastically shift their services. That left the centers with deferred maintenance and ongoing changes to the way they provide services and respond to needs.

“Grantmaking from the Louis L. and Julia Dorothy Coover Charitable Foundation is intentionally flexible to meet the emerging needs of our region,” said Jill Reynolds, senior vice president at Commerce Trust Company. “By serving as a social hub and offering nutritious meals, senior centers play such an important role in rural communities. We’re so glad to help these centers better serve the people who depend on them.”

Julia Dorothy Coover, a 30-year Commerce employee, founded the Louis L. and Julia Dorothy Coover Charitable Foundation in 1992 to honor her husband’s memory. Since then, the Coover Charitable Foundation has awarded more than $7 million in grants to nonprofit agencies and rural schools across the Ozarks region. Founded in 1973, the Community Foundation of the Ozarks is the region’s largest public charitable foundation serving a network of donors, 53 regional affiliate foundations, including the Owensville Area Community Foundation, and nonprofits across central and southern Missouri with assets of $394 million as of June 30.