Animal care (Best Friends Lifesaving Center, Sugarhouse)
Help care for the dogs, cats, puppies and kittens available for adoption at our lifesaving center in Salt Lake City, where you’ll receive orientation and training. Children 12-17 years of age can volunteer with cats alongside an adult, but you must be at least 18 years old to volunteer with dogs.
Veterinary Support
Best Friends veterinary teams perform daily spay and neuter surgeries at both our Sugarhouse Lifesaving Center and our high quality/high volume clinic in Orem. Volunteers help with cleaning and sanitizing surgical instruments, preparing surgical supply packs, and general cleaning around the clinic. We provide all training. Just bring a willingness to learn. This opportunity is open to volunteers age 18 and up.
Events
Help us spread our message about helping local shelters achieve no-kill by volunteering at events. Offsite outreach events spread the word about our mission, and pop-up adoption events help find new homes for cats and dogs in our care. Volunteers will work alongside our friendly team.
You can also be a part of the excitement and volunteer at one of our large community events. Strut Your Mutt is an annual dog walk and fundraiser that benefits Best Friends and local rescue groups, shelters and other animal welfare organizations. Super Adoptions are huge animal adoption festivals that bring in adoption groups from across the state. These lifesaving events wouldn’t be possible without wonderful volunteers like you.
Animal transport
One of the challenges of animal rescue is getting dogs and cats to where they need to go. Transport volunteers provide an essential service to Best Friends’ lifesaving programs by driving pets from point A to point B.
Animal transport includes everything from taking dogs from our lifesaving center to our spay/neuter clinic and back, to picking up cats from rural shelters and bringing them to Salt Lake City where they’re more likely to get adopted. Many trips can be done in your own vehicle, and we can provide training to allow you to accelerate the lifesaving by driving our cargo vans.
Reading program
Like reading and animals? Children ages six to fifteen, along with their parents or guardians, are invited to read to pets at our Salt Lake City lifesaving center. Reading to pets can improve kids’ reading skills and help the animals relax and destress, which can help them find homes.
We also offer specialized volunteer opportunities:
NOVA (National Operations Volunteers and Ambassadors)
Want to help Best Friends' pets from the comfort of your own home? Through our National Operations Volunteers & Ambassadors (NOVA) program, we offer unique remote volunteer opportunities that directly support lifesaving center operations in Salt Lake City and across the country. Tasks include data entry of animal records, writing animal bios for our website, entering medical records, updating animal pictures, post-adoption follow up, tracking foster hours, internet research and more! For more information and to sign-up, please visit our interest survey.
Large group volunteering
Big events, such as Strut Your Mutt and the NKUT Super Adoption, are great for large volunteer groups. The events are fun, help save the lives of homeless pets in Utah and require lots of volunteers to be successful.
If you're interested in participating as a group, please email us at utahvolunteer@bestfriends.org. Give us the name of your group leader, how many volunteers you anticipate having at the event and your available times, dates and hours.
Off-site and small group volunteering
Our lifesaving center is too small to host volunteer groups, but groups can help the animals in other ways. If you have a small community group, an Eagle Scout project or a group of children under 12 who want to do something to help the animals, consider hosting a food and supply drive for our pet food pantry, creating toys for our adoptable cats and kittens, or making blankets for pets in our spay/neuter clinic. To get started, please email us at utahvolunteer@bestfriends.org.
Community cat programs
Community (aka feral or free-roaming) cats are among the most at-risk pets in shelters around the country. You can help with trap-neuter-vaccinate-return (TNVR) efforts so that community cats stay out of shelters and continue to live safely in their outdoor homes.
Learn more and apply for community outreach or trapping and caring for cats. If you'd like to help with community cats in other ways, please email utahtnr@bestfriends.org.
Community service
We accept court-ordered community service volunteers with certain misdemeanor charges, but we are unable to work with those charged with anything violent or sexual in nature, or with persons charged with activities that involve deceit or dishonesty.
Please email utahvolunteer@bestfriends.org prior to volunteering to set up an appointment to sign your community service volunteer agreement and provide a copy of court documents.
