Five-year-old Jerome “Romey” Gleason asks his mother Sara Gleason whether he can go watch a movie with his cousins Thursday at the home of his aunt, Sara’s sister Amanda Maberry. Gleason explained the difficulty of being unable to work as she tends to her son, who has had a fever for about a month. She has sought help from the Ballard Center in paying rent so she doesn’t lose her apartment.

Andy Brown, director of human service programs at Ballard Community Center, 708 Elm St., has a list of about 400 names of people waiting for assistance with rent and utilities. Brown says that each month he adds more to the list.

In what used to be a turn-of-the-century school building in North Lawrence, Andy Brown sits behind a gray metal desk that looks like it could have been issued to a corporal in the 1950s U.S. Army.

Brown answers the steady stream of phone calls that come to the desk with a military-like precision.

“Ballard Center. This is Andy,” he says each time. “Can I help you?”

He already knows the answer to that question. Probably not.

At least not today. This is the first day of the month. The first day of the month isn’t as much about help as it is about the list. Brown is the director of human services for Ballard Community Services. As such, he’s also the top administrator for the community’s Emergency Services Council, which provides assistance to people who are about to lose their home after being behind on rent or utility bills.

But today, mainly, he’s the keeper of the waiting list.

• • •

8:53 a.m.: The phone rings.

“Right now I’m taking people’s names and numbers and as soon as we can help people, we’re giving them a call.”

There’s a pause as Brown listens to the voice on the other end of the line and grabs the pen next to his yellow legal pad that already has a handful of new names scribbled on it.

“Yeah, it is a really long list,” he continues. “Yeah, there’s a lot of names on it.”

At the moment, there are a little more than 400 names on the waiting list. There are 213 names waiting for assistance with rent. There are 230 waiting for assistance with utilities.

“That doesn’t count the ones we’re adding today,” Brown said.

Brown arrived at his desk about 8:30 a.m. on the first day of the month. In a matter of four minutes, he had added three names. In the first hour, he added eight, or one about every seven and a half minutes.

• • •

The list is a lot of things, but one thing it is not is a guarantee. There are a lot of people on the list who won’t get rent or utility assistance from the Ballard Center.

In some regards, it has always been that way. Until January of this year, the first day of the month at the Ballard Center was kind of like a re-enactment of the Oklahoma land rush — it was entirely first-come, first serve. The first people — as long as they met eligibility requirements — who got through to the little gray desk got the help. Those who were a little late got a piece of advice to come back next month.

“We were just getting overwhelmed with calls on that first day,” Brown said of why the system changed this year. “From 7:30 to 11:30, it was just constant. By the time lunch came, the word would spread that we were out of money.”

Now there’s the list. It may be more humane, but there is a downside to it, too. It provides a relentless reminder of how many people have been left unhelped.

“During the first half of the decade, it seemed like we usually had enough funds to help about 50 percent of the requests we received,” Brown said. “Slowly, over the last three or four years, the demand has been so outpaced by the supply that we’re down to 10 to 15 percent.”

This month, Ballard has about $1,000 to give in rent and utility assistance. That will allow the center to help five to seven families with rent or utilities.

Here’s how the system works. Ballard is one of five agencies — the others are The Salvation Army, Women’s Transitional Care Services, ECKAN and Douglas County Senior Services — that are part of the Emergency Services Council. Ballard, however, serves as the administrator for the council.

That means that Ballard has the checkbook register. Brown checks the balance in it a few days before the beginning of the month. From there, the formula is not too complicated. Brown — essentially — takes the total, divides it by five, and then tells each of the five agencies in the council that is how much money they can provide in assistance for the next month.

Then, he hopes the account fills back up before next month.

• • •

9:10 a.m. The phone rings.

“Not right now,” Brown says. “But I can put your name on my list.”

There’s a pause to listen.

“You guys would be one of my first-priority families, but I have a lot of people in that category right now.”

Brown gets to do a lot of that — prioritizing. He calls it triage, a term made famous by MAS*H and a host of prime-time emergency room dramas where actors playing God-like doctors make decisions about who can be saved and who can’t.

Here, Brown has his own checklist of who gets helped. First are families with children. Then, people with disabilities. Next, the elderly. Finally, single people in an emergency situation. Everyone who applies must meet certain income guidelines.

The checklist leaves some people on the outside looking in. Some categories of people have an uphill battle to receive assistance, Brown said. For example, a single male who is unemployed with no income is going to wait a long time. That’s in part because Ballard will spend its limited money to help children, if there is a choice. But it also is because there’s a hard facing of facts that goes on here. If the person has no income, how much will a couple hundred dollars of rent or utility assistance really help?

“Two hundred dollars, if he has no other income, probably isn’t going to keep him in a house very long,” Brown said. “It is not an easy decision to make. If we had the money, we would help everyone. But we don’t.”

But they do help some.

Nicole Helm walked into the office on the first day of the month visibly shaken. She was one of the handful that had been chosen to receive assistance for the month.

Her problem was one of cash flow. She’s on government assistance while receiving treatment for depression, but her food stamps do not arrive until the fourth of the month, and she needed to buy groceries for her two kids before then. A water bill to the city of Lawrence is what suffered.

She needed $181.67 to keep the water at her house on. She got it. (Technically the city got it. The program directly pays either landlords or utilities, not the people who apply.) But she knows she was lucky.

“I tell people just don’t take advantages of places like this,” Helm said. “They are here to help you, but sometimes they can’t. Just be grateful for what they can help you with. Lord knows I’m learning about that.”

Sara Gleason needed just $80 last month. Just $80, but it was the difference between keeping her apartment or losing it.

“The landlord said it couldn’t carry over to the next month,” Gleason said.

She turned to Ballard because she’s been caring for her sick 5-year-old son for a month. There have been multiple trips to the doctor and not enough time to go to work.

“I was really scared because I knew I couldn’t be homeless,” Gleason said. “I called Andy, but I just had a feeling he wasn’t going to call me back.”

He did. That’s one thing Brown almost always can do. He can always offer a few words. Whenever he adds a name to the waiting list, he tells the caller of a couple of other agencies to check in with.

“It gets really tough when you know everybody is out of resources, and you don’t have any place to tell them to check. Sometimes we refer people to the shelter, and that is really hard.

“Right now we’re trying to put together a plan for one woman to stay in a tent at Clinton Lake until she can get back on her feet.”

• • •

It’s not always going to be like this. Brown believes that. He also believes that Lawrence is going to fare better than most. Donations to the Emergency Services Council haven’t fallen off with the economy. They just haven’t grown at the same pace as the demand.

“Lawrence is a generous community,” said Brown, who is leaving the center to pursue new educational opportunities after about seven years of off-and-on service at Ballard. “The generosity of the community still exists. That’s a trait that doesn’t go away just because we’re going through hard times.”

Brown is no economist and certainly no fortune-teller. But he has started sharing his thoughts about what the future holds.

“My expectation is that there is a rosier financial situation for our community in the future,” Brown said. “But I also think we haven’t seen the worst of it yet.”

That’s kind of like the message he’s been delivering daily from his little gray desk: Not today, but there’s hope on the horizon.

Or, at least, on a list.