SAN MARCOS — The Southside Community Center has existed since the 1920s. According to Jessica Cain — the liaison for neighborhood engagement and community partners — the center’s mission is one of “serving to fill the needs of our neighbors in the community.”

Located on Guadalupe Street, just off the square in San Marcos, the current iteration was founded by the United Methodist Women, now known as the United Women of Faith.

Even though the center is located in San Marcos, it works with and supports people in need all over the county by offering daily services, which include: giving out hygiene kits, offering the ability to do laundry or take a shower and hot meals every day. There’s also breakfast available every day except Saturday.

“That looks like a variety of things,” said Cain. “We have daily services and these are for anybody who comes in, most of them just require that someone signs in.”

“Because we do serve a lot of the unhoused community, we have some services for those folks,” said Cain. “They can use our address as their personal address so they can receive mail. [It’s] really important for folks who are unhoused to have an address that they can use for getting documents, getting paychecks [and] applying for jobs. All of those things require you to have an address. We also have lockers on site, they’re generally occupied, but we occasionally have some come open so that folks can store their stuff in a safe place and they don’t have to carry all their belongings with them wherever they go.”

The center is not a shelter, Cain explained. It is a resource for those who are struggling and/or unhoused, but it does not have the capacity for overnight stays, except when it comes to their Rapid Rehousing Program, which provides a short-term space for individuals and families until they are placed in their new homes.

“We are in the process of starting a Rapid Rehousing Program. We’re kind of in our beta testing phase right now,” said Cain. “Rapid Rehousing is a housing-first model, with the goal of getting people into safe and stable housing and then addressing whatever it is that led to them being unhoused. It’s a research, data-based model that if you can get an individual or a family into a home and then wrap around services, there’s a much higher rate of success — with success being people stay housed — than if you try to address all the issues first.”

According to Cain, the center has been able to rehouse “on average a family a week, since November [2024],” due to the Rapid Rehousing Program.

“We serve about somewhere between 35 and 40 people on average at dinner every day and that’s just dinner,” said Cain. “We probably have roughly an equal amount of people who come in for other services, Monday to Friday. Obviously, some of those are overlapping, you might come in for emergency assistance and then, stay for dinner.”

The Southside Community Center is also the only official Emergency Weather Shelter in Hays County, which means that it is the only place community members can stay overnight when it gets too cold or hot to be outside. The center will offer space for those who need it when it is forecast to be at or below 35 degrees Fahrenheit or more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit for a period of three or more consecutive hours.

The center received a grant from the city of San Marcos as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to support the nonprofit’s services, which must be used by the center by the end of 2026. Since receiving that grant, the center staff has grown from three employees to 11. Because of its small staff size, the center heavily relies on volunteers.

“I did the math on volunteer hours. There’s a calculation about how much an hour of volunteer work is worth to a nonprofit. Last year, our volunteers provided about $100,000 worth of free work to the organization,” said Cain. “Our number one place [for volunteers] is Texas State [University]. We have social work classes, where the professors require their students to do 50 hours of service work in an organization during the semester. That’s a big one. Then, a lot of the groups — the fraternities, the sororities, the Black student association, all kinds of groups — will reach out to us and bring folks and they’re invaluable when we’re doing big projects.”

As a nonprofit, the center runs primarily on donations. It does receive money from grants occasionally, but as Cain said, “It’s not anything that we can kind of hold on to and pace ourselves in terms of the Rapid Rehousing Project.”

“Anybody who knows stuff about nonprofits, a $5 monthly donation is almost more valuable than a $100 yearly donation,” said Cain. “Because we can build a budget on recurring donations.”

“I think when we’re outside of the big cities, homelessness and poverty are harder to see,” said Cain. “When you go to Austin, despite some of the rules that are in place, you’re going to encounter someone at basically every stoplight asking for assistance. You’re going to see people in tents. The unhoused community and the impoverished community is just more obvious. It’s easier in a county like this to think that it’s not a problem and we don’t have to worry about it. Southside [Community Center] being here — we’re right here on the main drag — this is a problem and we’re working to address it. We’re not just going to highlight that it exists. We’re going to do what we can to really serve our neighbors, to make sure that people are stable and safe and have all of the things that they need for not just to survive, but to really thrive.”

For more information about the Southside Community Center and how to volunteer, visit www.southsidecommunitycenter.org.