By Hailey Heinz

Two Fridays ago, Cynthia Sweet was sitting in her office in Career Services. She had an hour to kill, and had no specific plans for the weekend. By Sunday, she had started a non-profit organization, and by Wednesday, she was in Louisiana, working to get dogs out of Gulf Coast shelters to make room for canine refugees of Hurricane Katrina.

Sweet is an international co-op counselor at Northeastern, and is now one of the founding members of Project Starfish, an organization dedicated to helping animals affected by the storm’s devastation.

“Through the coordinated efforts of a whole bunch of people, me and three other people started our own nonprofit within three days,” said Sweet. “We now have $6,000 worth of donations.”

The four founding members of Project Starfish are Sweet, her best friend Karin Gero and a couple from Watertown, Kara Peterson and Richard DiBona. Sweet and Gero still haven’t met the couple, who they connected with through the Internet. The group launched a Web site and quickly decided to make things official because they were receiving e-mails from people who wanted to make donations. They called the IRS, filled out the proper forms and, by Sunday, they were an official non-profit organization. Peterson and DiBona stayed back to man the Web site and coordinate the project from Watertown while Sweet and Gero made their way to the front lines.

Their first stop was Broken Down Dogs, a shelter in Alexandria, La. Although the original mission of Project Starfish was to transport dogs affected by the hurricane out of the area, Sweet and the others quickly realized that legalities made that impossible. Most of the dogs coming out of the hurricane-affected areas were quarantined due to serious health problems, and couldn’t leave the evolved into transporting relocating dogs already in the shelters to make room for all the canines displaced by the storm. They did this by finding new homes for the dogs, then coordinating horse trailers and drivers to get them there.

“Within three days, me and my best friend, we basically coordinated for 150 dogs to get out of that shelter, [and move] all over the country,” Sweet said. “[The shelter owner] brought in 70 more dogs, and we got them out of there.”

Since Project Starfish launched their Web site, Sweet said they have had more than 200,000 hits and have received almost a thousand applications from people in New England offering to adopt dogs.

By pure coincidence, Sweet was seated next to the emergency disaster relief manager for the International Fund for Animal Welfare on the plane to Louisiana. She said she has been communicating with him every day since then, and is now working with him in Gonzales, La., where she went after getting the situation under control in Alexandria.

Sweet is still in Gonzales, specifically at the Lamar Dixon Horse Expo, about 40 miles north of New Orleans. She believes it is the largest staging area for dogs coming out of New Orleans, with about 3,000 dogs and numerous teams of volunteers. She said dogs are being rescued from rooftops and attics, then brought to the Horse Expo.

“So basically they’re being put on a transfer truck, brought here, then they literally go through an assembly line, get washed, get shots, fed, watered, walked, caged,” Sweet said.

She said every volunteer is pitching in, doing whatever needs to get done. Although shots are being administered by veterinarians, just about everything else is being done by volunteers, and when they aren’t needed for other medical tasks, the vets are pitching in by washing dogs, walking them and doing whatever else is needed.

“Everybody is doing everything,” Sweet said. “I have washed, I have walked, I have cleaned cages … this is kind of gross, but a lot of these dogs are really traumatized, so a lot of them have explosive diarrhea and are throwing up.”

Although the work may not be glamorous, Sweet doesn’t plan on leaving Louisiana any time soon. She has taken all of her vacation days, and doesn’t know when she’ll be back.

“I bought a one-way ticket. I’m kind of one of those bleeding-heart drama queens who’s like, ‘I’m gonna go and I’m never coming back.'”

Her colleagues back at career services have been more than understanding, she said.

“They were really great about it; they said ‘go do what you need to do,'” Sweet said.

Ketty Rosenfeld, associate director of the Department of Career Services, said although she misses Sweet and worries about her, she’s glad to have her down there representing the university.

“She has a big heart to be there sacrificing her vacation time and helping this animal shelter. We’re very supportive,” Rosenfeld said.

She said the other members of the staff are taking care of Sweet’s responsibilities while she is gone, and hopes Sweet’s hard work will make a difference.

“I hope her efforts will be like a domino effect,” Rosenfeld said. “If everyone helps out a little bit, maybe things will get better faster.”