Episode 1: The Reno Rejection Symphony
How a simple grocery store taught me that some people’s jobs depend on problems staying unsolved
Picture this: You’re a disabled veteran who spent the past decade running nightclubs in Northern Nevada, watching your and friends, staff, and customers struggle daily with accessing healthy food in a city surrounded by agricultural abundance. You’ve recently returned from Burning Man, where you witnessed communities create functional systems through pure cooperation. And you think, “What if we could bring those principles to the real world?”
So you propose the most radically practical idea imaginable: a community-owned grocery store in downtown Reno that serves everyone regardless of ability to pay, and proves that cooperative food distribution can work in the default world.
How naive could one person be?
The Warning Shot: An Honest Confession
In 2017 me and a couple of UNR interns sat across from the president of the Food Bank of Northern Nevada, bringing some great news about a new grocery model I had developed that can cash flow in neighborhoods that can’t support supermarkets, and genuinely believing we could collaborate. After all, we were both trying to solve food insecurity – shouldn’t that align with our missions?
His response cut through my optimism with surgical precision: “We would love to help your nonprofit get a grocery store into downtown Reno, but we can’t afford to let our donors know that other options besides food banks exist.” Then he had us escorted off the property, and ordered his entire staff to stop talking to us.
Let that sink in for a moment.
The president of an organization dedicated to fighting hunger had just admitted that their business model depends on hunger remaining a problem. They couldn’t support a solution that might actually solve food insecurity because it MIGHT threaten their funding network’s attention.
This wasn’t corruption or incompetence. This was someone being refreshingly honest about how the nonprofit industrial complex actually works. Their job is to manage the problems of food access and waste, not solve them. Solutions that might make food banks unnecessary are considered to be competitive threats that needed to be suppressed.
I had stumbled onto something much bigger than food access.
The Network Activation: When Warning Becomes Action
What happened next taught me that institutional resistance isn’t theoretical – it’s operational.
2018: The Obstacles Appear After the food bank president’s warning, the “immune response” activated across multiple systems simultaneously:
- The city suddenly refused to consider usage of abandoned city-owned property for food access
- The sustainability office blatantly shut down discussions of grocery options during a public stakeholder engagement event hosted by the city itself
- Code enforcement found new reasons to scrutinize any food-related community initiatives
- Permits that should have been routine became mysteriously complicated
The Fake Opposition Reveals Itself During this period, I discovered that the Great Basin Community Food Co-op – supposedly our natural ally – was anything but cooperative.
Despite charging customers co-op fees for “ownership” and operating under the cooperative name for nearly 20 years, they had secretly switched to a non-profit model controlled by the state and with no federal presence. The director? A 35-year insurance veteran who had moved to the region just before taking over the organization and conveniently became a master gardener right before assuming the role, and his wife a marketing virtuoso who helped them develop an astroturf NGO that conveniently had the exact same programs as our fledgling startup NGO that they used to bury our grocery model in the public awareness.
This wasn’t a community food cooperative, despite the labelling. Great Basin was a state-controlled food system management tool designed to look like grassroots organizing while actually coordinating sector control by the state.
The Corporate Pressure Campaign
Early 2019: The Escalation The pressure campaign to abandon our efforts to build a community grocery expanded beyond government capture to direct corporate interference:
Walmart banned me from Sam’s Club in January for the crime of dropping off fundraiser flyers for their employee break room. Not for aggressive solicitation or disrupting operations – for placing community event announcements where such announcements were normally welcomed and had been the previous year.
When a major grocery chain considers you enough of a threat to preemptively cut off basic organizing capacity, you know you’ve touched something sensitive.
The Final Blow: When Good People Enable Bad Systems
By May 2019, despite the mounting obstacles, we had built significant momentum. Jim Gibson, owner of the Morris Burner Hostel and one of Reno’s most well known community figures, offered us space in his building on a five-year incubator lease as a way for him to satisfy fire code and open a cafe. With a location secures our nonprofit On Common Ground raised over $100,000 in donated equipment, materials, and store fixtures. Hundreds of volunteers signed up.
For four glorious months, it felt like we were proving that another world wasn’t just possible – it was inevitable.
Then Jim decided he wanted more money.
In September JIm hit us up for a rent bump, just four months into our build-out. When we explained, again, that we were a volunteer group operating on donated resources – the whole point of an incubator lease – his response was elegant in its simplicity: he changed the locks.
Just like that, we were locked out of everything we’d built. Jim’s daughter and friends helped themselves to our donated equipment, SNAP-Ed funded class materials, even donated drinks from our last fundraiser. Refrigeration units worth tens of thousands of dollars, office supplies, educational materials, volunteer contact lists – gone.
Here’s the beautiful part: The Reno burner community rallied around Jim.
Not around the principles. Not around the volunteer project that embodied everything the community claimed to value. Around the popular rich guy who owned the hostel.
Standing outside our locked storefront in October 2019, watching Jim’s friends load our donated refrigerators into trucks, I had my first real education in how quickly even central principles evaporate when they conflict with social convenience and greed.
The Pattern Recognition: How Institutional Resistance Actually Works
What I learned in Reno wasn’t about grocery stores or food banks or property owners. It was about how systems protect themselves from solutions that might make them unnecessary.
The Standard Playbook:
Phase 1: Enthusiastic Support
Everyone loves the idea in theory. Principles are beautiful when they’re abstract.
Phase 2: Practical Implementation
Reality sets in. This would actually change how things work.
Phase 3: Convenient Obstacles
Sudden rule changes, permit complications, “misunderstandings” about agreements.
Phase 4: Network Activation
Multiple systems coordinate resistance – regulatory, economic, social pressure.
Phase 5: Social Protection
The community rallies around the saboteur, not the sabotaged. The person blocking change gets protected by social dynamics.
Phase 6: Narrative Rewrite
The failure gets blamed on the changemaker’s naivety, not the system’s resistance to change.
Key insight: The players aren’t villains – they’re people doing their jobs within systems that reward problem management over problem solving. The resistance isn’t personal – it’s structural. Organizations that depend on scarcity will naturally oppose abundance.
The Strategic Error: Telegraphing Your Moves
Here’s where I made my critical mistake: I had been too transparent about my intentions.
Years earlier, during a legal battle with an insurance company over a different property, I had told my attorneys about my long-term plan to bring a community grocery store to downtown Reno by donating unused space below Rise Nighclub. I discovered later that those attorneys were positioned to undermine my case from within, and my entire playbook had been shared with the folks I was suing to get the property repaired after a pipe break.
This gave them years to prepare countermeasures. By the time I was ready to implement, they had already built the narrative sabotage through the community to ensure we couldn’t succeed.
The grocery store project didn’t fail because the idea was bad. It failed because we tried to implement a solution within a system that had reason to reject it that had nothing to do with community need and years to design resistance specifically targeted at that solution.
The Real Education: When to Pivot vs. When to Fight
By October 2019, my board treasurer Gemini Howzit, a long time Black Rock Ranger and the Northern Nevada regional Burning Man contact, and I faced a choice: keep fighting in Reno or find ground where our solutions could actually take root.
We chose to pivot.
This felt like admitting defeat at the time. But I’ve learned that sometimes the most strategic move is recognizing when you’re trying to plant seeds in poisoned soil and finding ground that actually wants what you’re growing.
The real lesson wasn’t about Reno. It was about recognizing when you’ve stumbled into organized opposition and learning to build where they can’t reach you.
The Plot Twist: This Was Just the Opening Move
What I didn’t realize at the time was that Reno was just the beginning. The same systematic resistance would follow me to Colorado, where I’d learn that some organizations have compromised trust networks in their volunteer and key staff positions who have developed very sophisticated methods for ensuring that people like me don’t build alternatives in any location.
But that systematic resistance also taught me something unexpected: the global community of people ready for these solutions is far larger and more supportive than any local opposition network.
Sometimes getting kicked out of the wrong community is the best thing that can happen to you.
The Takeaway: Pattern Recognition Is Self-Defense
If there’s one thing the Reno experience taught me, it’s that pattern recognition is a survival skill for anyone trying to create systemic change.
When you see enthusiastic support followed by convenient obstacles followed by network activation followed by social protection for the saboteur, you’re not dealing with bad luck or personality conflicts. You’re dealing with institutional immune response.
The question isn’t whether this will happen – it’s whether you’ll recognize it in time to protect your work and redirect your energy toward fertile ground.
Spoiler alert: That fertile ground exists. It’s just not where you think it is, and finding it requires letting go of the places that don’t want what you’re offering, no matter how much sense your solutions make.
The revolution isn’t about convincing people who profit from problems to embrace solutions. It’s about building with people who are ready for change and letting the old system become irrelevant through strategic bypass.
Welcome to the journey. It gets more encouraging from here.
Next episode: “When Solutions Come on Wheels” – How mobile infrastructure bypasses regulatory capture and brings regenerative solutions directly to communities that need them
