On an upper level of the Colorado Springs Police Department, the calls never stop. The people here stand before screens displaying maps of the city and other urgent information, and they respond through headsets. 

“Are you safe? Are you out of danger?” 

“Do you see flames or smoke?” 

It’s another day in the communications center, where 911 calls come in. But it’s not just any other day. 

In come happy, smiling dogs.

“Hello! Oh, you are very cute,” says one between calls, pulling away from her screen to greet Oliver the Labrador retriever. 

Others step aside to greet little Maya the Shih Tzu/poodle mix and big Daisy Hope the Newfoundland. There’s another Newfoundland here, Royce, who beckons all to take a break as he nuzzles up to them. 

The Go Team has arrived — the name of the local nonprofit with a simple mission “to offer relief, care and assistance to those in need.” 

The team regularly visits assisted living centers and nursing homes, airports and hospitals. The dogs go to schools when counselors call, often following tragedies. They go to sites of other disasters. They were seen around the Boulder King Soopers after the shooting there in 2021, and they were seen around Club Q after the shooting in 2022.

The dogs go to newsrooms, soothing journalists covering such tragedies. And they regularly go to police and fire departments, including this comms center.

Responders here are encouraged to mind their mental health, says Ira Cronin, the department’s public relations manager. “The people calling them are having a really, really bad day, maybe the worst days of their lives, and that can really affect you,” he says. “To just be able to pull away and pet a dog, it really means a lot.” 

It means a lot to the police chief. 

“These are the good days,” Adrian Vasquez says, bending down to rub Royce’s belly. 

The Go Team has aimed to brighten days since 2012. That June, as the Waldo Canyon fire raged, Nancy Trepagnier brought golden retrievers Tabor and Snickers to places of displaced people and tired firefighters. 

“One of the firefighters asked, ‘What’s the name of your team?'” Trepagnier recalls. “I said Go Team.” 

She had a previous career dating back to the 1970s in the airline industry, where “Go Team” referred to a taskforce rapidly deployed to a crash. Similarly with the dogs, “we’re ready to go whenever we get a call,” Trepagnier says. 

They are ready far beyond Colorado Springs. Trepagnier has grown Go Team nationwide.

Dogs were recently on the peripheries of protests in Minneapolis, Trepagnier says. They were there following the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida. Last year, they were there for the Palisades fire in California and there for the catastrophic floods in central Texas. 

Across the country more than 1,000 teams are active — one team being a handler and a dog — and thousands more have been trained over the years, Trepagnier says. Her nonprofit has been recognized with awards from the Red Cross and American Kennel Club. 

The growth has been beyond her wildest expectations, thinking back to the idea born from the Waldo Canyon fire. 

All while working in airlines and long before then, Trepagnier had been training dogs for typical obedience and atypical activities (Snickers took to surfing, skateboarding and kayaking, as did Tabor to an extent). But that 2012 fire indeed made Trepagnier think of a team specially trained for therapy. 

She put the word out to past clients. Some of those displaced people, those comforted by Tabor and Snickers, got the word as well. 

“I thought it was gonna be this little, tiny thing. I thought that first class might be five people,” Trepagnier says. “We had 32 people.” 

Around the time of that early training, the Black Forest fire started. It would be another devastating moment — another moment that brought the Go Team to people in need and brought the nonprofit mission to more eyes. 

Deb Galarowicz was one of the first Go Team members. 

“A lot of us were excited about the opportunity,” she says. “That was the first I had ever actually heard about being able to do something like that with my own personal dog.”

It was the first she had heard about such specific training for such a specific team, but of course she had heard about therapy dogs. 

The idea of dogs as therapeutic might span thousands of years — somewhere along the way of nomads domesticating wild dogs — but scientific literature has popularly pointed to 1796 at the York Retreat in England. That asylum sought gentler treatments instead of the day’s shock and chains. Dogs were noted as helpful. 

Their calming effects were also noted by Florence Nightingale, known as the founder of modern nursing for her work in the 1800s. The next century saw another nurse, Elaine Smith, create the first organization of its kind: Therapy Dogs International in 1976. 

By then, Trepagnier had come from a family of dog people. They trained and oversaw kennels. 

“We didn’t know it was called therapy dogs,” Trepagnier says. “It was just, take the puppies to the old folks home.”

She would see sad, lonely seniors suddenly glow — as Go Team members see today. 

That includes Nicole Sawicki. She brings Oliver to an assisted living center every Saturday. 

“Our favorite lady, she just passed,” Sawicki says. The lady is smiling in pictures with the golden lab, pictures that were sent to distant family who delighted in them. “Just knowing that she was at least having 30 minutes of joy,” Sawicki says. 

Sawicki has hoped to spread joy in her retirement from the Air Force. The Go Team’s fellow volunteers have similar military backgrounds. Others were teachers. 

“We all served in some capacity prior to this,” Kimi Musgrove says. “This is an opportunity for us to continue to serve.”

They serve, though they like to call themselves “dopes at the end of the rope.” It’s the dogs serving, they know. 

Musgrove saw her late Newfoundland, Boomer, lower blood pressures of a woman giving birth and another needing dental work. She saw Boomer sit with a man during chemotherapy; the man matched his schedule with Boomer’s visits.

Boomer would also go to the District Attorney’s office, where Go Team dogs often go. 

“When we do victim advocates, the kids might not talk to an adult, but they will tell their story to a dog,” Trepagnier says. “We just stand back and let them tell the story. They can tell it to the dog, because the dog is non-judgmental.”

Standing back is key, as it is in other sensitive situations, Trepagnier explains. The focus must be on the person in need, she says, not the person behind the dog. 

“It’s like I tell people that do our crisis response: You’ve gotta get to the point where you can’t cry. You’re the dope at the end of the rope,” she reminds. “We can never say, ‘We know how you feel.’ 

“You know,” she continues, “I lost my son to cancer, but I can’t tell another person I know how they feel.” 

She knows how she felt that day she was called to bring Tabor and Snickers to people in need during that 2012 fire. It was June 26. It would’ve been her son’s birthday. 

In 2007, after more than two years of battling melanoma, all while going to college and working and volunteering as he loved to do, David died. He was 23. 

He should’ve been five years older that day when Trepagnier got that call as the fire raged. It was always a hard day, his birthday. 

“I didn’t want to go,” Trepagnier says. “But I felt that little tap on my shoulder.” 

It’s what David would have done — taken the time to help others, like he did at soup kitchens. Yes, David would’ve gone to help alongside Tabor, the golden retriever who was meant to be his therapy dog. 

Instead, Tabor would lead the Go Team. 

“I call it David’s dream,” Trepagnier says of the nonprofit. “Everybody here has their own reason for doing it. I do it in memory of my son.” 

And yes, she does it for all in need. 

For people taking emergency calls here at the Police Department. Trepagnier walks around with Royce, her fluffy Newfoundland who nuzzles up to people taking a break. And later he’ll nuzzle up to Trepagnier, a dog’s service never ending.