Community Services at Half-Century Mark

Milton Mazer. Helen Maley. Molly McAlpin. The names have been assigned to history now and no longer appear with any regularity in the pages of this newspaper or in the conversation that takes place around the Island in the coffee shops and post offices, on the waterfront and on the Internet. But they are nonetheless woven permanently and inextricably into the fabric of the Vineyard community and they serve as a reminder of who we are and where we came from. Milton Mazer, Helen Maley and Molly McAlpin were three of the key founders of Martha’s Vineyard Community Services.

Dr. Mazer was a psychiatrist who started the first mental health center on the Vineyard that was the founding agency for Community Services, in its day a pioneering umbrella social service organization custom designed to serve the needs of the Island.

Mrs. Maley was a respected professor at Wheelock College who devoted her lifelong career to the welfare of young children and founded the Early Childhood Programs agency.

Mrs. McAlpin was a community leader and philanthropist who tirelessly led fund-raising efforts to get Community Services off the ground as a charitable organization and sustain it, long before the word nonprofit crept into the lexicon.

There were many others. But these three people well may serve as the symbol for this remarkable organization which turns fifty this year. Along the way it has weathered many cycles of this Island community, sharing in economic boom times and suffering in economic bad times. It has reshaped itself, shedding some agencies and adding others, changing leadership, creating strategic plans and submitting to repeated and frank self-examination. And fund-raising, always fund-raising to cover the constantly rising costs and continue its vital mission.

And through all this, Community Services has remained at its core essentially unchanged. An early mission statement prepared for a fund-raising drive and published in the Gazette when Community Services was ten years old is still relevant today:

“Martha’s Vineyard Community Services is an unusual organization designed to provide a wide range of human services for people living in an unusual situation. For while Islands may breed relatively self-sufficient human beings, the great range of human problems to which any people is heir requires a great range of skills and resources. Separated from the mainland and the network of services provided by the variety of voluntary and governmental agencies there, the needs of Island people often require new and unconventional approaches.”

The first Community Services included a mental health center, a visiting nurse agency and a youth center. Soon early childhood services were added along with the Thrift Shop, a key money-raising center for this agency which has perpetually operated on a shoestring.

Today the Island Counseling Center, Early Childhood Programs and the Thrift Shop remain the unshakable cornerstones of Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, while visiting nurse services and the youth center have migrated to other outside nonprofit groups. Other programs have been added in recent years, including one to combat domestic violence and violence against women, and another to provide supportive services and employment for people with disabilities. The most recent program provides services to people who are making the transition back into daily life following institutional treatment for drug and alcohol addiction.

When it was first being formed as a charitable organization, a fund-raising appeal letter went out to the Island community. A copy of the letter is tucked into the Gazette files. The letter is undated but must have been around 1960. It reads in part: “During the last two years a group of the citizens of Martha’s Vineyard have been meeting periodically to discuss some of the community problems and needs. The discussions have ranged from the causes of juvenile delinquency to the possible need for a visiting nurse. The leaders in organizing these meetings have been the doctors and ministers of the Island supported by the educators and those involved with the teaching of Island children.

“From the beginning of these discussions, it has been the opinion of the group that the Island was in need of psychiatric service, both clinical and educational, which could help the doctors, ministers and teachers with some of the problems which they face in their daily contact with the community.”

The goal that year was to raise $15,000 for the first-year operating budget of the newly formed Community Services.

The fund-raising continues on Monday night when the annual Possible Dreams celebrity auction takes place under a tent under the stars in Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs. The event raises a large share of money every year to cover the operating budget at Community Services. This year that budget is more than five million dollars.

The Gazette sends out best wishes and congratulations to Community Services on the occasion of this milestone anniversary. Here’s to a flush night of bidding and another fifty years of promoting good health and treating the constantly changing social ills of an Island community, a challenge unlike any other.

Surely there is no more important cause on the Island.