Using social media, a group of people are working to shed light on the Vineyard shuffle, the annual problem they say is afflicting the community even more severely this year.

Twelve years in the making, the complicated deal with the town, the land bank and the Howard B. Hillman family will create affordable housing, add conservation land and save a historic home in Chilmark.

The Martha’s Vineyard Commission voted 8-2 Thursday night to approve eight new second-story rental apartments at Post Office Square in Edgartown. Commissioners who backed the plan said the acute need for workforce housing outweighed other problems.

Two longtime Island affordable housing advocates will be honored at the State House in Boston Tuesday for their contributions under the Community Preservation Act.

Philippe Jordi and Derrill Bazzy are recipients of this year’s Kuehn Community Preservation Award, given out by the Community Preservation Act Coalition.

In 2007 the town of Chilmark, the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank and the Howard Hillman family announced a three-way land swap that was designed to save a historic house, open up a new conservation corridor and create more affordable housing up-Island.

Here are two words that are perfectly innocuous when standing alone, but always seem to raise hackles when put together: affordable and housing.

The term seems to evoke images of tenements and crack houses. And to be fair the history of affordable housing efforts on the Vineyard is not without hiccups. But the paucity of shelter that even middle-income people can buy or rent is indisputable and well documented. What makes the Island so attractive to summer visitors puts the price of real estate out of reach for many hardworking year-round residents.

“I’ve never had a pantry!” Geneva Corwin said as she toured her newly finished kitchen for the first time. “I have cupboards now, it’s amazing.”

The pantry itself was still empty, but “it won’t be for long,” husband Calvin Corwin said.

Jim Feiner is not your average affordable housing guy. He has no public funding, no board of directors and certainly no trust fund. But he has an idea.