Long before Mint for More existed as a 501(c)(3), before there was a building, before there was a logo, there was a chair at Samaritan Dental in Rogers.
Years before we opened Mint Dental Care in Centerton, Dr. McCord was volunteering at Samaritan, doing dental work for patients who had nowhere else to turn. That is where the model began. Not on a whiteboard. Not in a strategy doc. Just one chair, one patient at a time, in a community center that was already meeting people where they were.
It is the reason Mint for More looks the way it does today. The lesson from those early Samaritan shifts was simple. The patients who need dental care most do not show up because of a billboard. They show up because someone they trust, a case manager, a food pantry coordinator, a recovery sponsor, told them about a place where they could be helped without judgment.
Samaritan was that place for a lot of families in Northwest Arkansas long before we ever set up our own operatories. They still are.
What Samaritan Dental does
Samaritan Community Center runs Samaritan Dental out of their Rogers center on South 8th Street. Since 2014, the clinic has provided more than $5 million in free dental services to neighbors in Northwest Arkansas. They deliver about $650,000 in free dental care every year, all of it through a mix of paid staff and volunteer dental professionals.
To qualify, a patient has to be at or below 200% of the federal poverty limit, and intake runs through an application process. They run two programs in parallel.
The Restorative Dental Program scheduling treatment over a window of up to 24 months. Cleanings. Fillings. Extractions. Education on home care. Help applying for Medicaid or Medicare. And, importantly, access to the wraparound services that the rest of Samaritan Community Center offers, the Café, the Market, and Community Resource Navigators who can help a patient with the parts of life that are not strictly dental.
The Evening Dental Clinic focuses on acute pain. Appointments scheduled a month out. A volunteer dentist on the chair. An exam, an x-ray, and treatment when treatment is possible.
That is a lot of capacity for a community-based clinic. It is also, like every nonprofit clinic in this region, capacity that gets fully booked.
Where the partnership comes in
Two things tend to happen at the edges of a clinic like Samaritan’s.
The first is that there are weeks when the schedule is full and the patient sitting across from a Samaritan team member needs care faster than the next available slot. The second is that some treatment plans require a kind of work that a daytime restorative program is not built around. Dentures are the most common example. A denture is a multi-week project. Impressions, lab work, fittings, adjustments, follow-up after delivery. It does not fit cleanly inside a 90-minute hygiene-and-restoration block.
That is the seam where Mint for More slots in.
When Samaritan has a patient who needs care they cannot fit, or a patient whose treatment plan calls for the kind of slow, careful work that takes a full day in a private operatory, they can send the patient to us. We schedule the visit on a Thursday. The patient walks into one of our operatories with a partner organization already vouching for them.
The work itself depends on what the patient needs. A lot of what we end up doing on the back end of a Samaritan referral is dentures. Mint for More uses our own lab of choice for dentures, at no cost to the patient. Samaritan refers patients to us for that work specifically, because their own restorative setup is not built around the multiple appointments that a denture case requires.
It is a quiet, practical partnership. There is no event. There is no joint fundraiser. There is a phone call from a Samaritan team member, a slot on the Thursday schedule, and a patient who would otherwise be waiting longer than they should have to wait.
Why partner-only intake matters, told through this partnership
We get asked, a lot, why Mint for More does not take walk-in patients. The Samaritan partnership is one of the cleanest answers to that question.
Samaritan already knows the families. Their team has already done the eligibility work. The patient has already been through Samaritan’s intake and already has a Community Resource Navigator who can help them get to the appointment, get back to it, and follow up after. By the time the patient sits in one of our chairs, every part of the visit is set up to go better than a cold walk-in ever could.
We could not replicate that intake function from inside our own four walls. We do not need to. Samaritan and the other nonprofit partners we work with do it better than we ever could, because they live in the same neighborhoods as the families they serve.
Where this is going
A partnership like this one is part of the reason we believe a standalone Mint for More clinic can work. The patient pipeline is already there. It runs through our partners. What we need is more clinical capacity to meet the patients they are sending us, and more days a week than Thursdays alone can absorb.
Samaritan was where this work started for Dr. McCord, in a chair that was not his, in a building that belonged to someone else’s mission. Mint for More exists today because that early experience pointed at a model. Bring the dentistry to the partners who already know the people. Take the operational overhead off the table. Trust the partner network to do what only the partner network can do.
We are grateful, every Thursday, to be one stop in the network Samaritan helped build.
How you can help
Donate. Partnerships like this one work because Mint Dental Care covers the clinical infrastructure and donor dollars stretch further as a result. Last year, less than $70,000 in grants and donations supported more than $1 million in dental care delivered. Give to Mint for More
Support Samaritan directly. If this story moves you, the easiest first step is to support the partner that made the work possible in the first place. Visit samcc.org/dental-1 to learn about Samaritan Dental and how to get involved, including the volunteer dental professionals (dentists, hygienists, assistants) they continue to need. Donations of in-kind dental supplies (sensitive-teeth toothpaste, toothbrushes, floss) can be dropped at 2910 S. 8th Street, Rogers.
Follow the work. New stories, photos, and partner spotlights go up here regularly. Read the blog
— The Mint for More Team Bentonville, AR · A 501(c)(3) nonprofit · Powered by Mint