The SPCA has undergone many changes since its humble beginnings in February of 2002. As with nearly every small start-up non-profit organization, as time goes by and natural growth occurs, so do the growing pains of added services and mission changes. As you learn more about the job you have chosen to do, you also learn new ways to do it better, more efficiently, and reach more of the people and/or pets in the area you wish to serve. You also change as the people who choose to join you come and go, each bringing with them different ideas and dreams and areas of expertise and experience. Each of them add to the list of changes you will make to your organization. Too, each opportunity that opens itself to you will come with new challenges to overcome which will many times change yet again how you thought you would proceed in different situations. These things are nothing new to start-up non-profits. After 8 years, it would seem that we should begin to know by now just what we plan to do and how we plan to do it. In ordinary circumstances, we would tend to agree, but the growth of the SPCA has been anything but ordinary.

As we state on our homepage in a quote by our Founder and Past-President, "To be an organization which truly is of value to its community, our solutions to problems must first consider, and then include, the real causes of the problems we face, not just the results and aftermaths." Since the beginning, we have felt this is the true mission of any non-profit organization. Although it took many years of looking at the world around us and learning what we could from whom ever we could, to realize that this particular statement was the one we wanted to make. We always believed that animal shelters do not do enough. They do not truly help the problems that are caused by unwanted pets, and in fact, in many ways, they merely promote them by allowing irresponsible pet owners a way to shirk the responsibility they themselves took on when they first decided to get a dog or cat for a pet. One they hadn't truly thought about enough before bringing it into their home, and one that they thought for whatever reason, was simply a disposable problem once they realized they didn't really want it after all. We also watched again and again as people who did indeed love their pets, and who never had even considered the possibility of being forced to surrender them to an animal shelter, were forced to do so as an unforeseen situation arose in their personal lives which left them unable to care for the pet. Although the situation itself was only temporary and would be overcome in a reasonably short amount of time, the time needed was too long for them to just ignore the needs of the pet and something would have to be done to be assured the pet would be cared for. As they approached the only places they knew or could for help, they were told by the Animal Welfare groups, "Sorry, we only take the pet away and place it with a new home. Try a boarding kennel." (A boarding kennel is an option that only exasperates the problems faced by someone trying to get back on their feet as the expense itself will eventually lead to something else having to be done with the pet). They were told by the Human Services organizations, "We may able to help you, but we can do nothing for your pets. Try the animal shelter." Both of these solutions to problems faced at one time or another by almost every pet owner everywhere, we believed were simply unacceptable. We preached again and again our message, "Animal Shelters need to do more for the people the serve."

The realization that our statement itself summed up the main problem took us a while to learn. Animal Shelters do not serve people. That is not the basic structure of an animal shelter, just as it is not the basic structure for a human services organization to include programs that serve pets. Once we understood our own misconception, and one that is shared by the majority of people throughout the nation, we began to understand what it was we really wanted our organization's mission to be. With that in mind, we began to create programs and services that bridged the gap between animal shelters and human services. Programs which gave pet owners an option to not be forced to relinquish a pet that they truly love and want to keep, because of a situation which makes it temporarily very difficult for them to do.

We continued though, to also be an animal shelter ourselves as we grew to be the North Arkansas Central Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. We felt we needed to also still be there for the strays and other unwanted pets in our area. During the next two years, we struggled, desperately trying to get new money coming into the organization as our list of services and the number of people and pets we served grew, but our income remained the same, and even faltered during the recession. As we continued to be mistaken for other animal welfare groups within our area, ones that had been here for many more years than we ourselves, and ones that operate on budgets 100 or more times the size of ours, we began to realize that as an animal shelter, we were not truly making that much of a difference in our community. There were enough rescues and shelters in the area to be effective in reducing the numbers of strays along side our roads, that continuing to beat our heads against that particular "brick wall" just quit making sense. At the same time, our Human Services program continued to be noticed and grow. We were able at the same time, to expand our list of services as we found other needs within the area and our community.

In June of 2010, we brought our ideas in front of our Board of Directors. As a result, of this meeting, the animal shelter section of the organization was shut down except to our paid contract services for the cities we already provide these services to. The only exception being, to continue to provide Animal Abuse Investigations Support to local Sheriff's and Police Departments as needed. This left us room to then concentrate solely on our Pet-Related Human Services programs. These programs, and the fact that we are no longer an animal shelter, make us very unique and in fact, an entirely new type of animal welfare organization. One never before seen, that we know of, in the entire country.

Our new mission: To Bridge the Gap Between Animal Shelters and Human Services by providing programs which provide real solutions to people's problems through the use of animals. By utilizing shelter animals specifically, we also reduce the number of pets in, and being surrendered to, animal shelters in general. A Win/Win situation for all concerned.

So why keep the anagram SPCA? Because we still feel this is what all animal shelters should be, and will have to become, to remain viable in the 21st century.