The tent is down, the chairs and tables are gone. And five days after the Possible Dreams auction that raised just over $500,000 for Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, Ocean Park is again a place occupied by tourists with ice cream cones and children flying kites.

A couple miles away, at the Community Services campus off the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road, executive director Julia Burgess and auction cochairman DiAnn Ray take a few minutes to talk about the auction that is the sole fundraiser for the Islands’s sole umbrella social services agency. And there are questions. Is the tally enough? Are they disappointed? Happy? Exhausted?

The answers are yes, no, yes and maybe.

A full year of planning went into the auction. Last September, the economy hadn’t yet reached its current slump. The effect that the recession would have on Community Services and the auction was not yet clear. Only a few weeks before the auction, Community Services announced its budget for the coming year 2010. There would be salary reductions across the board and some program cuts. The gloomy outlook made a successful benefit even more important.

And yesterday morning both women called the auction an unqualified success.

“We’re very fortunate,” said Ms. Burgess. “There are very few organizations in the country that have the volunteer support that we have . . . because of the hard work of our volunteers we’re able to stay even and stay afloat.”

Mrs. Ray agreed. “It didn’t just happen like this,” she said, noting that the event planning has been like a full-time job for her since April. “We’ve got a wonderful committee,” she said.

“We couldn’t do it without the auction committee,” added Ms. Burgess. “I’m just flabbergasted. This is probably the best group of volunteers I’ve ever seen.”

In addition to praising the work of the hundreds of volunteers who helped improve the financial outlook for Community Services this year, they said the money raised in the auction will without a doubt help to ease some of the financial strain.

“We’re making no program cuts,” Ms. Burgess said. “In fact, we’re trying to address the future in ways in which we can actually expand our programming, and look at other ways in which we can offer our services in new, more cost effective ways.”

The auction itself brought in $260,000 this year. Though bids were not as high as previous years, and bidding went up in smaller increments, proceeds were supplemented by independent gifts totaling over $120,000 and an after-auction dinner fundraiser that raised more than $90,000. At the dinner, committee members encouraged patrons who had missed out on winning auction dreams to consider making a donation for the benefit of Community Services. That brought in $38,000 from different individuals. The grand total: $503,000.

Ms. Burgess attributes the generosity to people who understand the importance of what Community Services provides. “The rest of the country just looks at Martha’s Vineyard as just being this place for the rich, but there are just loads and loads of people, everyday people, who make it a wonderful place for all these people that visit. And they are the ones who need the support. It’s good that people don’t forget that,” she said.

This year was the auction’s 31st anniversary, and while the players have changed, the formula is essentially unchanged. “You always tweak things,” Mrs. Ray said.

One change was obvious this year. After decades of being held in the garden at the Harborside Inn in Edgartown, and an interim year at the Outerland Nightclub near the airport, the auction was moved this year to Ocean Park — its new permanent home. The committee believes it is a positive change. “Having the auction in Ocean Park has really opened it up to a whole new audience, a very diverse audience, and definitely has set the stage for the future,” said Mrs. Ray. “Monday was just such a wonderful basis for going forward, for establishing the next 30 years. It was a great investment in our future,” she added.

And despite the fact that the auction brought in less than in recent years, Ms. Burgess said it would be a stretch to call $500,000 a disappointment. “People are saying that the amount we raised this year on the auction is kind of back to what we raised maybe seven, eight, nine years ago,” she said. In 2006, the auction raised more than $850,000. “[That year], the economy really spiked . . . that’s when our contributions went really, really sky high,” Ms. Burgess said. And while Community Services was elated at the outcome, they understood that it was unusual. “This is actually a reflection of going back to a much more normal income,” she said.