The YWCA of San Diego County was founded in 1907, by Dr. Charlotte Baker, Ellen Browning Scripps, George Marston, and G. Audrey Davidson. Then San Diego had no recreational centers, no adult education classes, and no employment bureau for women; but within a year of its founding, the local YWCA provided all of these services, and grew into a 500-member organization by 1908. From 1908 to 1910 the YWCA opened the city's first cafeteria, the first employment bureau, and the first Traveler's Aid Office Bureau. Throughout the following decades, the chapter was devoted to community service, creating summer camps, cooperative housing for women and families, female unemployment assistance programs, and aiding servicemen during both World Wars.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, San Diego's YWCA continued to expand its services. Because of the city's growth, the YWCA established branch divisions to satisfy the needs of local neighborhoods. These branches became centers of activity in communities. They offered outreach programs, established recreational programs for teenagers, and health and physical activities, and child care.
The YWCA is known across San Diego for its public activism. Throughout the organization's history, the most significant and long-term programs have been designed to aid physically and emotionally abused women and their children. In the 1970s, Battered Women's Services, the first comprehensive domestic violence program, was established in San Diego. A series of state and county grants received by the San Diego YWCA in the 1970s and 1980s funded a pilot project to provide shelter and support for victims of domestic abuse. In the 1990s, the YWCA organized the 24-hour Domestic Violence Hotline, which provided crisis intervention, counseling, and shelter placement to more than 2,500 callers each year. Since 2002, the YWCA has operated Cortez Hill - a highly successful 120-day transitional housing program for homeless families.
In 2008, The YWCA of the San Diego County celebrated its centennial. Special Collections is honored to hold this important collection, and has recently made the fully processed collection available for research. The collection, processed by Lana Kondratenko, comprises approximately 67 linear feet of materials including administrative records, financial records , legal documents, correspondence, publicity, photographs, slides, negatives, scrapbooks, audio and video tapes, floppy disks, CDs, and artifacts. The collection includes an extensive amount of photographic material documenting many of the YWCA's most important activities, including photos from the 1910s-1920s. The collection consists of six series: Historical Files, Administrative Information, Buildings/Facilities, Programs and Services, Events and Conferences, and Media and Artifacts. A full finding aid is available here.
