Photo/Kris Vagner
Early in May, when the garden was in need of maintenance, a city planner named Gunnar Hand was looking for a project. “He mobilized his folks,” Isham said. “They approached Home Depot, got all the plants donated.” A couple of days later, the garden’s 11 sturdy boxes were full of strawberries, chives, chard and several other herb and vegetable starts. “It happened super fast,” Isham said. “My hat is off to them. Gunnar doesn’t even live here.”
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Sandy Isham of the Reno Community Assistance Center, has praised the Vanguard group’s work. Participants brought in new plants for the RCAC’s rooftop garden.
A national conference of young thinkers mixed, mingled and jump-started urban renewal projects here in Reno BY KRIS VAGNER
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andy Isham greets a confused-looking homeless mother as if she were a friend, manages two or three conversations at once in the hallway of the family shelter without seeming the least bit harried, and pushes the elevator button. She reaches the roof, where she can see storm clouds passing by. She’s pretty sure it’s going to rain, but still she gives the maintenance person a ring on her cell phone to announce that the new pepper and string bean seedlings in the rooftop garden look thirsty, and the irrigation hoses don’t seem to be helping. With long, gray-blond hair and a youthful smile, Isham is warm, welcoming, and ready to deal with any number of large and small details that come up over the course of a day at the Reno Community Assistance Center on Record Street, where she works. She helps residents address basic needs such as food and shelter, and offers extra comforts or learning opportunities
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whenever possible to help make life there feel more normal. One of those extras is the rooftop garden. “We’re in a food desert,” Isham said, referring to the East Fourth Street-adjacent neighborhood. “The downtown restaurants are great, but there’s no fresh food down here for people in poverty, just liquor stores that sell cookies and chips. If you’re in poverty, that’s very difficult. You don’t have access to fresh produce.” The garden was built in 2010 by United Way volunteers, and while it’s not large enough to meet the needs of all 27 families currently at the shelter, it has come in handy as a teaching tool. Last year, a chef from the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe taught residents about crock-pot cooking using veggies grown on the roof. This year, the cilantro plants are healthy, the peppers are growing, and Isham is considering a salsa-making night.
Hand lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and the folks he mobilized to plant the garden were among 55 urban leaders who convened May 5-8 in Reno for the Vanguard conference. Put on by Next City, a nonprofit that publishes media and holds events to advance its mission of social, economic and environmental change, the conference aimed to gather “the best and brightest young urban leaders,” including people from government, urban planning, business and art. This is the sixth Vanguard conference, and the first in the West. “Next City puts out a request for proposals each year,” explained Sara Schuenemann, the organization’s events and development manager, from her office in Philadelphia. “Reno came back with the best presentation.” Doug Erwin from the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada enticed Next City to hold the conference here. He cited Tesla, Start-up Row, and recent downtown revitalization as reasons Reno would make a good host location. The 55 “Vanguards,” as the participants are called, gathered at Whitney Peak Hotel. Among them were six Renoites: Paul Baker Prindle, gallery director at the University Of Nevada, Reno; Reno City Councilmember Oscar Delgado; Brianna Bullentini, owner of Rawbry, a juice bar slated to open soon downtown; Andy Durling, partner at civil engineering firm Wood Rodgers; and Reno Bike Project executive director Noah Silverman. The Vanguards toured a few areas where they’d be expected to propose improvements: East Fourth Street; City Plaza, across from City Hall; and “The Lids,” as Next City had nicknamed the covered ReTRAC trenches downtown. Thursday evening, May 7, they gathered at Cargo Concert Hall to compete in a “Big Idea Challenge.” They’d been divided into groups weeks earlier and asked to present some “tactical interventions”—projects large or small that would improve Reno, had worked elsewhere, and could be implemented for $10,000. The Vanguards’ creative juices were stirred easily. “My group has already had two conference calls,” Baker Prindle had announced two weeks before the event began. The Big Ideas ranged from simple to ambitious. Delgado’s group Googled “Reno Arch.” The search results showed a lot of selfies, so they decided to
