Tami Brown hits the legacy trail with Troy

Tami Brown had spent 20 years as an executive at Xerox before deciding she’d had enough of corporate America. “I wanted to do something to live where I wanted to live, to live my personal values.” For Tami, that meant starting a vacation rental business and hiking, biking, and skiing every spare moment in the Wasatch Mountains outside Midway, Utah, where she and her husband, Wayne, moved from New York 11 years ago.

It also meant making sure animals in need would be granted opportunities for living their best lives, too. Tami, a generous patron of Best Friends, met a dog named Troy who was recovering from injuries while she was on a trip to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah.

“He’d been through a lot,” says Tami. “He really stole my heart.”

Troy got Tami thinking. “I wanted to make sure that when the time comes and I’m not here I can leave something in perpetuity.”

By the time Tami left for home, she had named Best Friends as a beneficiary of one of her investment accounts. “I think we all hope we have a long runway ahead of us,” she says. “But none of us knows.”

And riding alongside to his new life as Tami’s inseparable trail mate was one very happy dog named Troy.