Staff photo / Dan Pompili Austintown Senior Center Director Brittany Koch shows off the new mural designed by Austintown Fitch art students, installed in the center’s main hallway last week. The theme is “Generational Austintown.”

AUSTINTOWN — The Austintown Senior Center just got a makeover and its new director has no plans to stop there.

Brittany Koch, who was hired in November to replace longtime director Jim Henshaw upon his retirement, has been baptized by fire in her short time at the helm, but said she is excited about the way the center serves the community, and is looking forward to the positive changes ahead.

Many of the improvements already completed, and those soon to come, will focus on helping the senior center’s members to be healthier.

“Coming from a medical background, being able to do chronic illness education, nutrition programming is very important to me, and even when I was in my hiring process I was able to convey that to the trustees, and I think we’re all on the same page, where we want to go from here. For it to be not just a social center but more of an educational center,” Koch said.

On Friday, the township opened the center to showcase the first phase of the new look.

“We did a face-lift for the whole building and our rental room,” she said. “As for the rest of our updates, we did new paint, we redid the bathrooms, and we’re going to keep checking things off as we go forward.”

Where temporary wall partitions were, they will install a more permanent partial wall to provide more privacy for the fitness area and do the same for the card and game area.

Much of the work was completed while the center closed for the last two weeks of December, shortly after it was used as a support and staging area to help those affected by the explosion at the Phoenix House senior living high rise, during Koch’s first week on the job.

During recent heavy snowfall and subzero temperatures, a pipe broke in the library. That also has been repaired and Koch said the damage was insignificant.

“The damage to the library was extremely minimal, and we ended up saving everything. So it got new paint and everything got put back the way it was, and everything is fixed,” she said.

Most walls are painted a mild gray, with Fitch Falcon Blue used for the accent walls.

Another noticeable addition is a mural in the main hallway between the regular gathering room and the rental room. A vinyl mural featuring photographs intrinsic to Austintown grace the wall across from the kitchen.

“Austintown Fitch art students designed that,” Koch said. “The theme was ‘generational Austintown,’ and I think they captured that beautifully. The instructors came in and put that in last week, and it’s more than what I could have even imagined.”

The cost of the mural was covered by the Austintown Junior Women’s League.

Township Administrator Mark D’Apolito said most of the renovations at the Senior Center were completed at no cost to taxpayers, and the upcoming improvements will largely be covered too. The township obtained two $5,000 grants, one from the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley and the other from the Western Reserve Health Foundation.

Koch said Austintown’s plans for the center focus a great deal on continuing to provide high-quality services and programs at little to no cost to residents and a reasonable cost for out-of-town members.

But that means they will continue to pursue grants and other external funding opportunities to support the center. Koch said they are in the process of applying for more grants.

The senior center operates solely on its original levy, which was passed in 2010. The 0.5-mill levy generates about $327,000 annually, D’Apolito said.

“Nothing as far as grant exploration is off the table, and I think the trustees and I are open to everything. It’s just exploring those and what works best for our facility,” Koch said. “The grants that we have gotten right now are for exercise and things like that. We’re using them to do some upgrades here, for some benches and a few upgrades in our kitchen.”

Most programs cost very little, if anything. Koch said they have a $5 package that gets residents and members alike access to all of the center’s exercise and art classes for the month. Memberships are $75 annually, but can be prorated for members who join later in the year.

But Koch said the center’s focus will evolve as well and at least some of its programs and classes will be open to nonseniors. These include courses on using online health apps and home health equipment.

“Access to care is hard, especially as we get older, and now financially it’s difficult for people, because things cost a lot more than what they have coming in. So we are trying to find ways for them to get transportation, access to appointments, giving them the opportunity to use telehealth, and to learn how to use that self-monitoring equipment,” she said. “Those are the things I’m looking forward to being able to do for our members, and not even just our senior members, but the community. I don’t think we should be limiting what we have here to just seniors. We are a community organization for a township and I think if we have the ability to help people that we should be doing that.”

While the center doesn’t provide daily meals, it does offer lunch-and-learn courses wherein a lunch is usually included.

“We used to do meals, and it’s just not financially appropriate to do that at this time,” she said. “But having the space for people to access the internet, to be able to get on the computer, to be able to access fitness equipment that they would not otherwise be able to use, that’s the kind of space we have here right now.”

Renovations to the kitchen will focus on making it feel more residential and less commercial and the cooking classes will be more attuned to teaching people how to cook good healthy meals with what they have access to at home.

Koch said continued support for the community and from the community is a dynamic she also wants to prioritize. Fitch volleyball players came last week to interact with members, and the center recently helped a kindergarten class with a project.

“I want to continue to build on the relationships with other community organizations like Direction Home, and just be able to help offer our seniors things they don’t even know they have access to, and then just build our membership. A lot of people still don’t even know we exist,” she said.

Koch added that business sponsors who provide support for even smaller programs, like monthly birthday parties, can make a major difference in the fiscal health of the facility.

“It helps pay for any equipment we need — new bingo cards, things like that. People don’t realize how much money goes into the little things. But any amount we’re very grateful for,” she said.