EICAP Organization

EICAP reminds me of a poor Mexican's house. My wife and I once spent a lot of time in Mexico.
We noticed that the poor Mexicans had a process and procedure for getting themselves a house.
First, they would simply squat on some land that no one else wanted. Perhaps it would be the lee of a windswept sand dune. They might have a fire and a box to sit on. Then, they would scavenge some cardboard boxes--the bigger the better. They would use the boxes as a shelter in which to get out of the wind, sleep or change clothes. Gradually they would scavenge some scraps of wood and some nails and they would build a crude framework to which to attach pieces of cardboard. Soon, a small rectangle would appear. As you can imagine, this would soon be improved with a crude roof. Before long, one side might be a piece of wood sheathing rather than cardboard. And so it would go until in a year or two concrete footings might be appearing and, before long, the makings of a real house would be underway. These types of houses are NEVER finished--they are a perpetual "work in progress." My wife and I visited certain areas of Mexico over such a long time span that we were able to see people lift themselves from a campfire with no shelter into a pretty nice concrete-walled home!

So it is with EICAP. EICAP began with a few scraps of a program and gradually has scavenged here and there and tacked on a variety of this and that programs. Whenever EISSA or EICAP leadership would see an opportunity to latch onto something, that leadership would drag the newfound item home to tack it onto their little home. Pretty soon, the agency began to look like a real agency.

The point here is that you should never forget that EICAP has always been a "creature of opportunity." As leadership saw opportunities, they stepped forward to take them. So it was with RSVP and that's why it's germane to your orientation here.

If you look around you in EICAP, you will see all sorts of programs that seemingly have little or nothing in common. I suggest you remember this little blog post in trying to make sense of EICAP organization. It's just like the analogy of the poor Mexican's house. It's a large, multi-million dollar agency now with well more than 100 employees scurrying about doing all manner of things. It didn't just spring full bloom into this existence and it often wasn't with a genuine premeditated long range plan in hand. It basically just happened this way.

With that in mind, we will now discuss RSVP history and how this RSVP came to be a subjugate of EICAP.