Redwood Community Center Improves Neighborhood With Hard Work, Food

Redwood is located five miles south of downtown San Marcos, but the area feels like an island of poverty in a sea of prosperity. Sulema Arrecis, administrative director for the Redwood Community Center, said she improves the lives of residents by coordinating with volunteers.

Redwood’s location in the northeastern corner of Guadalupe County makes it difficult to acquire social services and aid, according to the center’s information handbook.

Some of Redwood’s poorest areas are located in the San Marcos extraterritorial jurisdiction, making them ineligible for some of Guadalupe County’s services, according to the handbook.

Redwood’s geographical difficulties have forced Arrecis to seek help in unlikely places, she said. Community center officials seek aid wherever they can find it, including San Marcos, Hays County and San Antonio.

The Redwood Community Center’s partnership with the San Antonio Food Bank allows officials to provide for hundreds of local families the third Friday of each month.

It was business as usual on the third Friday in February.

A truck from the San Antonio Food Bank arrived shortly after 9:30 a.m., its side emblazoned with a picture of little girl eating a slice of watermelon. “Sure looks like a delicious watermelon,” said Phil Walker a volunteer from San Marcos, shifting his weight onto his cane. “She’s smiling too. God bless her.”

Walker’s physical disability prevented him from helping unload donations from the truck. He offered words of encouragement and joked with the other volunteers as they worked.

More than 20 volunteers were present. Some were from churches in San Marcos. Others were from Texas State’s Alpha Phi Omega service organization. A few were from the Redwood community.

Griselda Contreras, a resident of nearby Martindale, sat in her car about halfway down the line with her 4-year-old daughter Kamilla in the back seat. Contreras said her husband works, but she cannot take a job and instead stays at home with the five children. She has been coming to the food drive for about a year.

Money often stretches thin in the middle of the month with the rent due date fast approaching, she said. The donations come at a crucial time for Contreras and her family.

“I hope they have mac and cheese like last month,” Contreras said.

Up the street from Contreras, the volunteers unloaded boxes of sweet corn, instant mashed potatoes, ripe mangoes, whole wheat rotini, frozen chicken quarters, celery, purple grape juice and bananas.

“Stack the potatoes as high as you can,” said Caitlyn Odom, a volunteer from a San Marcos church.

“I am the queen of bananas!” said Vicki Janek, a volunteer from San Marcos’ First United Methodist Church, jokingly, as she hoisted a box of bananas from the truck to the pavilion outside the community center.

Evelyn McDaniels, a volunteer coordinator for the community center, walked through the crowd of volunteers with clipboard in hand, pointing with her pen and shouting instructions.

McDaniels has lived in Redwood since 1986 and can remember when things used to be a lot worse, she said.

In the 80s, the community was plagued with gangs, drive-by shootings, thefts, graffiti and fires, she said. “There was no police, no fire department, no animal control,” McDaniels said. “We had packs of dogs running loose, and when the adults were at work, the kids would skip school and break into houses.”

For years, Redwood only had unpaved dirt roads, hindering the presence and effectiveness of police, fire and animal control departments, McDaniels said.

Community representatives petitioned Guadalupe County to pave their roads in 2000 only to find the cost to be $105,000, McDaniels said. This amount was too high for Redwood residents to pay on their own.

Redwood’s land developer, a man known affectionately as “Mr. Gieseke,” deposited $95,000 into the community’s road development fund, McDaniels said. This act transformed the community for the better.

Police and fire department response times have drastically lowered, and packs of wild dogs no longer wander the streets, McDaniels said.

More than a dozen cars sat parked on one of the roads paved by “Mr. Gieseke” as the volunteers unloaded boxes from the truck. Each vehicle in line displayed a pink paper voucher wedged under a windshield wiper to show the owner had registered with the community center and was eligible to receive a donation.

“They’ll still keep showing up,” Arrecis said. “They’ll keep coming by 11, 12 o’clock.” One by one, the recipients drove to the front of the community center, giving thankful smiles and kind words to the volunteers as they loaded bags of food into the cars.

By noon the last of the cars had filed through and received their donations.

Arrecis smiled as she estimated the total number of families fed was 270, with some coming to the center to pick up their donations and others waiting at home for deliveries. 

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Jon Wilcox is a news reporter for the Universirt Star where this story originally published. It is reprinted here through a news partnership between the University Star and Corridor News