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This year, 2013, marks RCAP’s 40^th year of existence. In 1973, the first formal organizing event, a legal incorporation, took place in the series of events that make up RCAP’s early origins. This article is the first of occasional ways we will be looking back at the history of RCAP and its predecessor programs.

The ideas that started it all

In the late 1960s, a local rural initiative, called the Demonstration Water Project, in Roanoke, Va., was started for low-income people. One of its leaders was Cabell Brand, a former shoe-business owner who founded various programs and organizations to assist low-income people in the Roanoke Valley. “There were 278,000 families in Virginia without indoor plumbing, and so we developed a technique for doing that,” Brand explained to The Roanoke Times.

The project was based on the idea of self-sufficiency and sustainability. Its goal was to train and organize communities to run, operate and maintain their water systems independently. The project’s efforts included board training, technical training for those who operated the systems, and assistance in obtaining financial assistance. 

This project was organized by the Roanoke Valley community action agency, Total Action Against Poverty, with funds from the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO).

OEO was the agency responsible for administering most of the War on Poverty programs created as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society agenda. In 1975, the agency’s name was changed to the Community Services Administration, and in 1981, some of its functions were transferred to the Office of Community Services (OCS) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). OCS has continued an uninterrupted funding stream to RCAP regions for their water and wastewater assistance to the present day.

By 1972 the Demonstration Water Project project had become the core of a coalition called the National Demonstration Water Project (NDWP). Funded by OEO with a $6 million grant, the NDWP was a unique experiment in accelerating the process of social change in rural areas for the benefit of low-income families and communities. Primarily a reform effort, NDWP sought to improve the means by which rural residents, especially those in the low-income bracket, received water and wastewater disposal services. The overall objective of the program was to push for the provision of more and better water and wastewater disposal services nationwide to low-income people at prices they could afford.

The NDWP was incorporated in 1973, the event whose anniversary we mark this year. At the time, the NDWP consisted of the original Virginia project plus projects developed by another community-action agency (in West Virginia), two health centers (in Arkansas and South Carolina), a rural electric cooperative (in Florida), and a Chicano uplift/empowerment organization (in New Mexico). By 1976, two additional projects had joined NDWP—a Chicano-controlled nonprofit water company with an ethnic uplift agenda (in Texas) and a self-help housing program (in California).

The early activities of the NDWP included: field demonstration projects; research and publications; serving as an information clearinghouse; management and technical assistance; and building awareness through the Commission on Rural Water. From 1974 to 1978, NDWP spent over $9 million through its affiliates, which had grown to 16 statewide affiliates and 35 special program agency partners, to improve or create water and wastewater systems in rural America, primarily for direct construction related costs.

The RCAP model

In 1977, the immediate successor of the OEO, the Community Services Administration (CSA), made a planning grant to NDWP to develop a demonstration program aimed at using community-action agencies to provide water-supply and sanitation assistance to low-income, rural communities. NDWP’s proposal for a Rural Community Assistance Project called for the creation of “intermediate organizations” that would serve as sources of technical support to rural community-action agencies interested in becoming involved in water supply and sanitation activities. CSA first funded the program in 1979.

Two geographic areas were chosen for the initial demonstration effort—the Northeast and the Midwest.

In the Northeast, an organization called Rural Housing Improvement, Inc. (RHI), in Winchendon, Mass., was selected as one project. RHI had been founded in 1969 as the major low-income housing-development agency in New England. As a Rural Community Assistance Project, RHI would add water and sanitation development to its portfolio and would develop staff capability that would enable it to become the center of competence in this sector in the Northeast.

Today, RHI is known as RCAP Solutions and is the Northeast affiliate of the current network. Its continued work in housing is one of its major programs.

In the Midwest, a different model for the demonstration was used. A highly regarded organization devoted to sustainable agriculture—the Center for Rural Affairs (also established in 1973) in Walthill, Neb.—had been involved in the conceptual development of the RCAP program but did not want to be the project itself. It spun off a new organization, the Midwest Assistance Program (MAP), for that purpose. Today, MAP still exists as the Midwest affiliate of the RCAP network.

Over the next two years, CSA designated four additional projects:

• Virginia Water Project (VWP), Roanoke, Va., the successor agency to the local demonstration project that began NDWP (Southeast Rural Community Assistance Project, the Southeast RCAP, today)
• Rural Community Assistance Corporation (RCAC), Sacramento, Calif., a 1978 spin-off from Self-Help Enterprises, a leading housing-development agency in California’s San Joaquin Valley (still RCAC, RCAP’s Western affiliate, today)
• Great Lakes Rural Network (GRLN), Fremont, Ohio, a consortium of state community-action agencies, managed by WSOS, a full-service community action agency serving four northwest Ohio counties (Wood, Seneca, Ottawa and Sandusky) since 1965 (WSOS and the Great Lakes RCAP still exist today)
• Community Resource Group (CRG), Springdale, Ark., founded in 1975 by three community action agencies in Northwest Arkansas, which was part of the original NDWP Arkansas project (CRG, based in Fayetteville, Ark., is RCAP’s Southern affiliate)

With these additional initiatives, the project achieved nationwide coverage. As they were formed, each of the projects joined the NDWP network as full-fledged affiliates.

The network in transition

By 1981, NDWP consisted of 36 affiliate organizations and was truly a nationwide network. This was the same year the Community Services Administration, the primary funding source for both NDWP and many of its affiliated organizations, was abolished and moved into the Department of Health and Human Services. NDWP expanded its funding base to include a variety of federal agencies and foundations.

Although the 1980s was a difficult decade for social programs, both NDWP and most of its affiliates were able to weather the changes. By the late 80s, NDWP had achieved many of its goals. The NDWP’s trial efforts had been successful not only at widening and improving service delivery but also at achieving policy reform at the state and federal agency and legislative levels.   In the field, NDWP pioneered the use of cluster well systems, fostered the involvement of rural electric cooperatives in water supply and sanitation facilities development, developed the concept of regional support companies for small rural systems, and was instrumental in obtaining state funding for rural water programs.

At the policy level, NDWP was able to achieve significant changes in key funding and regulatory agencies, including a new method of figuring loan-to-grant ratios by the Farmers Home Administration). In 1985, the Farm Bill provided for a technical assistance set aside that led to actual appropriated funding to RCAP a few years later. This was the first such program in that agency’s history. The Farmers Home Administration eventually became Rural Development in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and today a grant from that agency funds RCAP’s Technitrain Program for technical assistance to small water utilities.

The NDWP started to receive innovative and alternative technology set-aside funding from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1988. EPA currently provides funding to RCAP for its annual budget.

In late 1988 and early 1989, the board of directors of NDWP undertook a careful consideration of the future of the organization. After 20 years of successful operation as a demonstration project, the effort was in need of revitalization and a new, more permanent focus. The decision was made to bring NDWP to an end and to rename the corporation and change its structure to formalize the network of permanent RCAP service institutions that NDWP had spawned.

The permanent RCAP network

The formal transition from NDWP to RCAP culminated in February 1989 with adoption of a revised set of bylaws and approval of a resolution to change the corporate name to Rural Community Assistance Program, Inc. The core of the restructured organization was the six regional RCAPs. RCAP, Inc. is governed by a board of directors composed of 12 members, six of whom—the regional RCAPs—are permanent members. The remaining six are selected annually from the RCAP network and the interested public.

The board decided to retain the NDWP staff as the RCAP national staff. RCAP’s activities thus became managed by an executive director and a small headquarters staff under the oversight of the board.

By the end of fiscal year 1989, most aspects of the transition from NDWP to RCAP, Inc. were completed, and the permanent corporate structure was in place. In 2001, the national office was moved from Leesburg, Va., to downtown Washington, D.C., in order to give its staff easier access to the funding agencies and to carry out advocacy on Capitol Hill.

In 2004, the organization changed its name slightly from the Rural Community Assistance Program to the Rural Community Assistance Partnership. This change was made to more accurately describe in the organization’s name a partnership-type arrangement rather than a uniform, nationwide program. In other words, RCAP, Inc. is an umbrella organization and name, a way to link the individual water and wastewater programs that are run in the six distinct and autonomous organizations in the network. Today the organization is often also referred to as a network (the “RCAP network”)—the connected collection (i.e., partnership) of the regional RCAPs or partners and the national office.

Together, the regional affiliates of RCAP employ nearly 130 technical assistance providers and managers in the field. A small staff of six works at the national office in Washington, D.C.

Other articles in this issue:

• Director's Letter
• Rural Developments (news briefs)
• Civil engineering group’s study warns of economic consequences of underinvestment in infrastructure
• Worldwide spending on protecting watersheds growing rapidly
• Five things you can do to improve your utility’s financial health