Numbers tell the story, this year more than ever, for Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, the Vineyard’s sole provider of a wide array of essential human services on the Island.

The annual budget, announced two months ago, cut half a million dollars, a ten per cent reduction from last year, down to bare bones. Community Services employees will see their salaries cut and their benefits reduced.

And due to the recession, funding for programs that usually comes from state and federal contracts has dried up like rain puddles on a sidewalk in the summer sun.

All the while, the demand for services is at an all-time high in virtually every area of need. The case load at the Island Counseling Center is heavier than it has been at any time in its long history. Connect to End Violence, the program that operates a hotline and offers intervention for domestic violence, has seen a huge spike in demand for its services. Early Childhood Programs, the long-running agency that provides an array of vital services and programs for young children and parents, is hard pressed to keep up with the need and will be forced to eliminate its home-based family day care program this year due to funding constraints.

Importantly, most of these services are provided by Community Services alone — there is little or no duplication, which is to say that without them there will be none.

And so on Monday night in Ocean Park as August begins — the last full month of summer and peak season for fund-raising on the Vineyard — eyes turn to the annual Possible Dreams Auction, the celebrity event that has raised a remarkable eight million dollars in the past thirty years to help Community Services pay for its annual operating costs.

The location for the auction is new this year, in the Island’s most celebrated park, a landmark public space that was designed in the late 1800s by Robert Morris Copeland.

What a good place for dreams to begin.

And speaking of dreams there are many, some new, some old.

The Island’s own Carly Simon will be back, this year for a private concert sail on Nat Benjamin’s schooner with her son, Ben Taylor. Many will recall the bidding war that Ms. Simon incited for a song and a peanut butter sandwich some years back, egged on by the late, great humorist and auctioneer Art Buchwald.

And while Mr. Buchwald and another Dreams anchor Walter Cronkite are gone (the auction will be dedicated this year to Mr. Cronkite, who died two weeks ago), other famous faces will take their place.

Washington, D.C., insider and civil rights attorney Vernon Jordan will be available for a dream round of golf at Farm Neck. Some lucky bidder will win the right to walk onto the Los Angeles set of the award-winning NBC comedy The Office.

Another will go out with friends to paint with master landscape artist Allen Whiting. Another will take four people onto the set of the NPR weekly comedy quiz show Says You with Arnie Reisman and Paula Lyons.

And the dreams go on.

In 1977, when the country was experiencing another economic downturn, an editorial in the Gazette made the following observation about Community Services:

“This is not earthbound enterprise. It has earthly ups and downs, but has never yet stayed down, and most surprisingly it is found soaring during the most difficult times. So much is said, not as a coinage of praise, but to emphasize that giving to Community Services on the Vineyard is giving to something peculiarly alive, human and undefeated by circumstance either materially or in spirit.”

Big dreamers will be needed on Monday night in Ocean Park to help keep Community Services alive; there is no more important cause.