Guard Dogs Do Not Party

Kelsey Bongiovanni

It is a cold Saturday night in Storrs but inside the Carriage apartment the party goers are sweating. Katie and her friends gather by the keg, trying to figure out how to get home. They know they are too drunk to drive but the thought of walking home on the dark, curvy roads that are so characteristic of New England chills them. Katie pulls out her phone and dials a number.
“Guard Dogs,” the woman on the other end replies. “Where do you need a ride to and from?” she yells in order to be heard over the background noise from the other end. She does it without sounding upset. “Ok, someone will be there in 20 minutes.”
Guard Dogs is a non-judgmental ride home for University of Connecticut students and stands for “Giving UConn a Responsible Driver”. The program is entirely student run and over the past three years it has seen a staggering increase in volunteers. In 2007 Guard Dogs had only six members. But as of 2010, the program boasts over 250 members, 50 who volunteer on a regular basis and about 200 hundred who volunteer less frequently.
What drives these students to give up their weekend nights and shuttle around their drunken classmates? Some volunteers say its entertaining, others think it’s a good alternative to partying, but one contestant refrain is that Guard Dogs helps save lives and people want to be a part of that. “I feel like I am keeping my community safe,” Morgan Maneely, a 4th semester economic major who volunteers with Guard Dogs said, “If people don’t have a sober ride back to campus, they may result to drunk driving.”
Like Maneely, Caitlin Cuskley also likes keeping her community safe. When Cuskley came to Storrs as a freshman in 2006 she took a First Year Experience class that left her looking for an on-campus project to get involved with. When she came across Guard Dogs, which was still in it’s developmental stages, she wanted to be a part of it.
Guard Dogs was founded in 2006 by Rebecca Auger and Shawn Logue. It became a pilot program of the Undergraduate Student Government and receives a majority of its funding through USG, about $40,000 a semester.
Now four years later, Cuskley is the executive director of Guard Dogs and has watched the program grow since it first began.
The fun, laidback atmosphere of Guard Dogs helps to keep volunteers coming back each Friday and Saturday night. “I don’t sigh the nights I drive,” Cuskley said. “It’s a break from the normal party thing.”
The dramatic increase in volunteers over the last three years has created the ability to give more rides. Guard Dogs believes that every person driven home is a life saved and since the program started four years ago they have helped saved over 14,000.
It takes the driver a few minutes to reach the Carriage House apartments. Katie and her two friends sit in the back seat of one of the seven Guard Dogs vans. Insulated from the winter cold, they pull away from the party and head towards home.