A Utah-based nonprofit is rewriting the definition of animal sheltering in northwest Arkansas — starting with the name. Dubbed the Best Friends Pet Resource Center, the modern facility in downtown Bentonville is no traditional animal shelter.
“Traditionally, shelters have been modeled after prisons and located in the outskirts of town, usually by the dump or the landfill,” Michelle Logan, executive director of the Best Friends Pet Resource Center, said in an interview. But the Pet Resource Center takes a completely different approach.
The 20,000-SF building is in Bentonville’s 8th Street Gateway Park. The project, completed in 2023, was a $19.8 million endeavor to create a community hub for pet adoption, vital veterinary services and animal-based events.
The facility’s business model is a departure from government-funded municipal shelters. Best Friends operates as a private nonprofit with 40 staff members in northwest Arkansas. The Pet Resource Center is part of the national nonprofit Best Friends Animal Society, which manages 5,500 shelter partnerships across the country.
Its model relies on a sophisticated foster network, corporate volunteer programs and partnerships with brands like Walmart, Purina and Mars. And funding comes from donors and corporate partnerships, which allows the center to support local shelters and offer services for free or at affordable prices for low-income pet owners.
Corporate partnerships can start at around $25,000, Kristin Switzer, the philanthropic partnerships lead at Best Friends, told Arkansas Business. But the nonprofit employs a flexible model so that businesses of all sizes can be involved. Switzer was also the capital campaign director for the Pet Resource Center.
The Walton Family Foundation and the Alice L. Walton Foundation played a large role in funding the center, as well as national pet brands, other local companies and individual donations, Switzer said. Now, the facility has an advisory committee of corporate partners. Walmart, a founding partner, co-chairs it, with other members including Blue Buffalo, Purina, Mars, Clorox and the Sam Walton School of Business.
Partnerships are key to the center’s services, Logan said. For companies, Best Friends offers workplace giving programs, adoption event sponsorships and programs in which businesses advertise animals through social media, with companies like the Keith Law Group of Rogers and J.B. Hunt participating.
Best Friends supports shelters across the state, offering veterinary services, adoption support and physical resources. A Best Friends behavior training specialist also visits local shelters weekly, offering training tips and determining which animals need to be pulled into the Resource Center.
As of September, the Pet Resource Center had placed more than 6,720 pets in homes, starting in March 2023, and had helped facilitate 4,045 more adoptions in collaboration with local shelters and rescues.
“All the resources that we get, we consistently share those out with all of our local shelters and rescues,” Logan said. “Traditionally, municipal animal services are never resourced well enough. It may seem like we are very well resourced, and in comparison to others, we are, but no organization has all of the resources that they need. There are times where we are reaching out when someone has a resource we could utilize.”
The ultimate goal is helping every shelter in Arkansas, and the country, achieve no-kill status, which is defined as saving 90% or more of animals from euthanization. According to Best Friends’ data, 49,000 dogs and cats entered Arkansas shelters in 2024. Of those, 5,800 were euthanized because of capacity issues. Arkansas saved 80% of healthy treatable pets in the state’s shelters in 2024, which is slightly less than the national average of 83%.
Logan has several priorities for the future: scaling return-to-home efforts so lost pets don’t enter shelter systems, reducing length of stay between intake and adoption, and becoming even more involved in the community.
The center also serves as a pilot site for the Animal Society, testing new programs that could be replicated nationally.
Modern Animal Shelter
Since opening, the Pet Resource Center has become one of Arkansas’ largest intake shelters — without a single row of kennels. Instead, the shelter features open rooms where dogs and cats freely roam.
The center’s physical design reflects that philosophy. With 4,000 SF of glass, visitors can observe animal care like meal preparation and litterbox cleaning.
The building features Third Space Coffee, a vegan coffee shop where visitors can interact with the animals. It also hosts a volunteer headquarters, a retail merchandise store and convertible spaces that can accommodate increased capacity.
The center has hosted more than 3,000 community events since opening, including on-site activities like “Kitten Bingo,” off-site events and virtual programming.
“We try to invite the community in, versus not letting anybody see the animals or interact with the staff,” Switzer said. And the center draws around 10,000 monthly visitors, Logan said.
Logan emphasized the facility’s focus on keeping animals out of kennels. To accomplish that, fostering is customized.
Options range from doggy day outings — where people can borrow a dog for a hike or an afternoon — to weekend sleepovers or long-term care. Fosters can drop dogs off at the center during work hours for “doggy day care,” in which animals receive enrichment and exposure to adopters before being picked up in the evening.
The center also partners with the 21c Museum Hotel in Bentonville for a pet sleepover program, allowing guests to foster dogs overnight in their rooms at no cost.
More than 900 fosters have worked with the center, and it has more than 300 active volunteers that help with services.
In addition to the foster system, the center’s clinic performed 5,000 discounted spay-neuter surgeries in 2024.
The clinic offers free weekly wellness vaccine clinics and microchipping, as well as free pet ID tags. More than 7,935 animals that were not in the direct care of Best Friends have been vaccinated at the center and more than 3,615 have been microchipped there.
The center’s pet food pantry distributes hundreds of pounds of food monthly, Switzer said, supported by donations from corporate partners and local donation drives.
“We are able to support the local pet-owning community so that they don’t have to make a difficult choice between affording to care for their pet or relinquishing their pet,” Logan said.
And for adoptions, the center operates a client services team that works with pet owners similar to social services, Logan said, offering resources pre- and post-adoption.
“It’s very magical when you go in and feel the different energy,” Switzer said. “We really wanted it to be a place to invite the community in to be part of the solution.”
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