Welcome to the Central Arizona Chapter of the Employee Assistance Professionals Associations (EAPA)

What is an Employee Assistance Program?
History of Central Arizona EAPA...
Top 6 reasons to join our chapter...

We serve Central and Northern Arizona. All of our members work directly or maintain an interest in the field of Employee Assistance. Our membership includes private and for-profit, independent, union and management based CEAPs, social workers, licensed behavioral health providers, students and marketing professionals. As a group, we are committed to improving skills and upholding the goals and ethics of the EAP Core Technology.

Employee Assistance is the work organization's resource that utilizes specific core technologies to enhance employee and workplace effectiveness through prevention, identification, and resolution of personal and productivity issues. (As approved by the International EAPA Board of Directors in July 2003)

What became EAPA started when employers began to notice on-the-job drinking, and decided to do something about it. Their responses ranged from punitive, to enabling, to supportive, and finally, to enlightened compassion. As the 12-Step recovery movement took hold in the early 1940s, plant managers and supervisors began to show compassion and solicited recovering employees to work with impaired workers to get them detoxed, into support groups, and back on the job. This less-than-sophisticated approach got considerable help with the passage of what is known as the Hughes Act of 1970. The Hughes Act, for the first time, got the federal government to acknowledge the disease aspect of alcoholism and require federal agencies to offer treatment to impaired employees as an enlightened alternative to immediate dismissal. The Act opened the door to today’s treatment approach as we know it and to coverage by third party payers.

One of the many offspring of the Hughes Act was the Occupational Programs Branch of NIAAA under the dedicated leadership of Don Godwin. This allowed the State of Arizona, in 1975, to hire 29-year old Jim Roth as a consultant. His job was to carry the EAP message to public and private sector employers that employees were better served if their addiction was caught as early as possible rather than waiting for them to enter the end stage of their disease. The new EAPs learned how to make a positive impact on employee lives and on corporate profits. They also discovered that declining productivity, absenteeism, tardiness, and accidents were symptoms of many other problems (domestic violence, poor financial planning, etc.) than simple alcoholism. Thus, the “broad brush” EAP format was born.

Jim Roth soon realized that EAPs in Arizona were isolated and took steps to bring them together so they could learn from each other. After several attempts, what is now the Central Arizona EAPA convened on July 13, 1978 at Furr’s Cafeteria in Phoenix and has met every month since then.  For the last 30 years, EAPA members have developed personal relationships, educated themselves, developed programs for the “troubled employee” and networked among those in ancillary professions such as Human Relations.

1. Our monthly meetings will provide you with networking opportunities and the ability to develop new business contacts.
2. You can enhance your education and training through our daylong seminars held each spring.
3. You can earn PDHs (professional development hours) and CEUs while learning new skills. You can obtain or maintain the valuable CEAP (Certified Employee Assistance Professional) credential through mentoring by a Central Arizona CEAP.
4. You can showcase your private practice or other areas of expertise.
5. You can avail yourself of a multiplicity of leadership opportunities by becoming a chapter officer.
6. Students enjoy free chapter membership and can participate in meetings where they can learn about the EA profession and make valuable contacts for possible future employment in the field.