Meals on Wheels Cash Starved

East Hampton Meals on Wheels said on Tuesday that it is “running at a significant deficit” and “may have to cut service to certain clients or reduce frequency of meals.”

Without additional support, said the nonprofit organization’s acting president, Frank Eipper, “in about two and a half years, we’ll have nothing left” in the way of operating costs. “We receive no federal or local government funding. All revenue is from private or corporate donations,” he said.

Meals on Wheels’s 45 volunteers deliver hot and cold meals five days a week to homebound clients who are mostly elderly, injured, or ill, and unable to shop or cook for themselves. Full-priced meals cost about $14 per day, a figure that far exceeds what the organization’s 60 or so clients pay for them. Many people cannot afford the full price, Mr. Eipper said, and more than half of them don’t pay anything at all.

“The numbers [of clients] have gradually gone up, and with that trend of meals going up, the number of people who are not paying has gone up, too,” he said.

Meals on Wheels has two part-time employees who coordinate the volunteers’ routes and perform other administrative tasks. Once upon a time, Mr. Eipper said, it could run on donations plus the interest on its capital, but “Now, we have to go at the principal, and we’re eating away at the principal? . . . If everybody paid, and our donations went up a little more, we would be able to cover the budget.”

The 32-year-old organization plans to examine its client list to make sure everyone on it truly needs its services.

Meals on Wheels is a national association with individual organizations in more than 5,000 communities across the U.S. that are not typically affiliated with each other. Mr. Eipper, who was formerly the local group’s treasurer but recently became its acting president, said a search for a new president is under way, and that more volunteers would be very welcome. Donors and prospective volunteers can find more information at ehmealsonwheels.org.