If you call the office of the Island Affordable Housing Fund these days, you don’t get a secretary answering. You get Ewell Hopkins himself, executive director, chief cook and bottle washer.

“That’s what I am. Absolutely,” said Mr. Hopkins yesterday. “I’ve laid off the entire staff. I am a staff of one.”

These are lean times at the fund, an umbrella fund-raising body of sorts for affordable housing on the Vineyard. Mostly it’s down to necessity, as Mr. Hopkins tries to restore the organization he was left by the profligate former director Patrick Manning. But it’s also about principle and appearances.

That principle, as Mr. Hopkins puts it, is this:

“Nothing is sacred but the mission. The first priority is not the organization, it’s the mission. So if the mission of the organization is threatened, we have to consider everything else as expendable. We have to consider how lean we can be and still provide the needed services.”

At the moment, the fund is still providing the services, but only just. In November last year, just after Mr. Hopkins took over, came the revelation that the fund could not meet its November payment to the county’s rental assistance program, just two days before it was due. Island towns had to step in, to ensure landlords got the money to subsidize their affordable rentals, and tenants did not wind up out on the street.

Things have gotten a little better since then, Mr. Hopkins said. But only a little.

“When it all blew up at the end of last year, that’s when the towns stepped up for a couple of months, to give us a chance to try to raise private contributions.

“We have diligently tried to raise money, but we’re still going month to month. We had hoped we could have raised the money all at once and then allayed a lot of people’s fears. But that hasn’t happened.

“We made the February payment, the total payment. The March payment we were able to come up with $10,000 of the roughly $20,000 they [the Dukes County Regional Housing Authority] needed, and they were able to do some short-term borrowing to cover the balance,” he said.

In large part that was due to the generosity of one board member, Kenn Karakul, whose foundation kicked in $5,000 for the month.

“And I’m happy to inform you that I just received a matching grant from Kenn, that as well as contributing $5,000 toward this month’s rental assistance program, he’s making a $5,000 match for the April payment.

“If we can get the public at large to match him, we’re halfway there for April, at the beginning of March. I’m really excited about a board member stepping up like that, with a total contribution to the program of $10,000. It speaks to the importance of this program,” Mr. Hopkins said.

But beyond April, the fund still has to come up with three months more money, to get them to the end of the fiscal year, at which point the Island towns will be asked to take over the funding burden for rental assistance.

And that depends on the will of town meetings, of course. But Mr. Hopkins is hopeful; the towns’ respective Community Preservation Committees have all endorsed the release of money for rental assistance.

But there’s still much to do, and not much to do it with given the “extreme” drop in donations to the fund, and the lack of staff.

Mr. Hopkins now has members of the board coming in two days a week, to help out with running the office.

“That’s not sustainable,” he said, “but it’s an interim step; I’ll need to replace them with volunteers who can come in one or two days a week and keep this ball rolling, can get the letters of recognition out, ensure the bills are posted and paid, and that we open our mail and respond to our phone calls. We’re going to have a whole new business model.” He continued:

“Most nonprofits doing the work we do rely significantly on volunteers. Historically we have relied on volunteers for events, We need to rely on volunteers for ongoing operations.”

He also concedes there is “definitely” a perception among Island residents that affordable housing was running fat.

“We’ve got a lot of bad press for legitimate reasons over the last few months, but now we’ve got to move beyond that and make sure the contribution wells don’t completely dry up.

“It comes back to transparency, to people understanding the budget, neighbors talking to neighbors and explaining what it is that we’re spending the money on.”

Which was definitely not the case under the former regime. But Mr. Hopkins resists the temptation to dump on the guy who left him a mess.

“Pat’s gone,” he simply said. “I have not spoken to him. I’ve kind of made it a policy not to speak to him. I don’t know where he is.”

And, to be fair, it was not all the fault of the previous executive director.

Up until now, said Mr. Hopkins, the spending priorities in affordable housing had been decided by “a very narrowly-defined group of individuals.”

And that too is changing.

“I’m encouraged that more people are getting into the debate,” he said.

“The end result, I believe, will be something where we’ll be much more informed as a collective body, better able to make decisions that reflect our values.”

To that end, Mr. Hopkins is finalizing plans for a gathering he has provisionally named Ten Years Later (it is 10 years since the affordable housing movement first organized on the Island), a big public forum to take place on April 8 at the Grange Hall.

It will be a follow-up to last November’s meeting, held at the Vineyard Haven Library, during which Mr. Hopkins and his board faced sometimes aggressive questioning about their operation.

“We sort of introduced ourselves at that one,” he said. “This time we’re going to give the public the chance to ask the questions they want.

“I hope everybody who has an interest in the quality of life on the Island will attend.

“What we need now is an open and frank discussion about what people consider to be the priorities of our community now.”