STRIPES, MU’s safe-ride organization that runs Thursday through Saturday nights, gave its 100,000 safe ride during operation this past weekend.

“It is a pretty big milestone for us,” STRIPES Director Jeri Pautler said. “I was the one to actually give the 100,000th ride, which was really cool.”

STRIPES is completely volunteer-based and was founded in 2001.

“We are based off of an organization called CARPOOL, a very similar program (to STRIPES),” Pautler said.

According to the STRIPES website, the safe rides program CARPOOL was founded in 1998 at Texas A&M. In April 2001, five MU students visited Texas and brought back plans for what later would become STRIPES.

STRIPES ran its first night on Oct. 4, 2001 and will be celebrating its 10th birthday this fall, Pautler said.

“There have been many changes over the years STRIPES has been running, even in the years I have been here,” said Pautler, who has been a member since Fall 2008.

In STRIPES’ early years, the organization did not have a solid base of consistent members, STRIPES Fundraising Assistant Chris Rucker said.

“We also had a limited amount of drivers because no one could drive under the age 21,” he said.

Since the launch of STRIPES, the driver age cap dropped to 19 and membership has spiked. The organization currently maintains 300 volunteers, Pautler said.

“We had over 500 applications come in this year, but we did not have room to place them all,” Rucker said.

This past weekend was also the first weekend STRIPES has run 12 vehicles, Pautler said.

“Running 12 cars really decreases car wait time for callers and increases our efficiency,” she said. “This is definitely something we couldn’t do without our volunteers or MSA (Missouri Students Association).”

STRIPES, an MSA auxiliary, receives its funding from donations and from MSA.

According to the STRIPES website, it costs about $1,200 to operate one night.

To sustain funding for STRIPES, and in celebration of the 100,000 ride milestone, the group’s members handed out free STRIPES “100,000 Rides” T-shirts in the MU Student Center on Wednesday and accepted donations. STRIPES will be launching an official fundraising campaign, “$100,000 for 100,000 rides,” this year, Rucker said.

“The campaign will try to raise money for the STRIPES endowment fund, which covers operation costs,” he said. “The goal is to use less of MSA’s money.”

Rucker said as for other future goals, the organization is still in “celebration mode.”

“We will be looking forward to when we reach the next 100,000 ride mark,” he said.