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Graettinger Awarded A-A-R-P Recreational Grant For Seniors

August 24, 2023 Steve Schwaller

(Graettinger)– A Community Challenge grant from A-A-R-P Iowa is making the town of Graettinger more senior friendly. Eight Iowa communities received the grants. Most of this year’s grant recipients were in rural areas, with projects focused on enhancing community livability. That will be especially noticeable in Graettinger, population 840, which received a twenty-thousand dollar grant from A-A-R-P Iowa to build pickleball courts and improve walking trails. City Clerk Kara Currans says that’s a big grant for tiny Graettinger, and will go a long way to helping seniors be more active and healthy…

“We’ve got about 1.2 miles worth of walking trails that we’re going to go ahead and complete so that we can take wheelchairs, walkers on them. You know, family kind of stuff. It’s going to go ahead and allow seniors to get more fit.”

In Graettinger, a town where Currans says everyone knows your name, the grant is doing more than helping build exercise infrastructure. It is also helping strengthen community engagement and bolstering a sense of local pride in what it provides for its residents, despite being small…  

“It’s an old town here. We’ve got the oldest celebration here in Iowa. Our Labor Day celebration. We all come together and do parades, carnivals, street dances, you know, that kind of good stuff here. So AARP allowing us to develop this area, it really kind of brings the town together.”

In all, the eight Iowa communities received more than 57-thousand dollars in A-A-R-P Community Challenge grants – among the largest group of grantees in the program’s history.

(Courtesy Iowa News Service)