Cape Area Community Foundation awards Coover Regional Recovery Grants

From left to right: Glenn “Skip” Smallwood, board president of the CACF; Judy Cantoni, east region manager of the CFO; Amy McDonald, president of the Cape Girardeau Public Schools Foundation; and Dr. Neil Glass, superintendent of Cape Girardeau Public Schools

The Cape Area Community Foundation has awarded total grants of $10,000 to two nonprofit agencies for recovery needs related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The grants are made possible by the Louis L. and Julia Dorothy Coover Charitable Foundation, managed by Commerce Trust Company in partnership with the Community Foundation of the Ozarks. The Cape Area Community Foundation is one of 30 CFO affiliate foundations to receive Coover grant funding this year and chose to use its award to hold a community recovery grant round for eligible nonprofits.

The Cape Area Community Foundation awarded its Coover Regional Recovery Grants to:

• Cape Girardeau Public Schools Foundation: $7,500 for the “Connecting the COVID Disconnect” project to close learning gaps in math

From left to right: Glenn “Skip” Smallwood, board president of the CACF; Judy Cantoni, east region manager of the CFO; Becki Arends, district manager with Junior Achievement; and Michelle Jones, board secretary of the CACF

• Junior Achievement in Southeast Missouri: $2,500 to support virtual classroom programs and career fair

“One of the benefits of the CFO’s affiliate network is the ability of local leaders to make decisions in the best interests of their own communities,” said Jill Reynolds, senior vice president at Commerce Trust. “Using leaders across rural Missouri to award Coover Charitable Foundation grant dollars has contributed to this partnership’s success in distributing more than $7 million since 2002.”

The Cape Area Community Foundation, founded in 2015, is one of the CFO’s 53 regional affiliate foundations. The CFO is a regional public charitable foundation established in 1973 that provides asset and resource development, grantmaking and public leadership across central and southern Missouri.