Reno Collective prepares move to Arlington Towers

The Reno Collective is on the move again.

Next month the cooperative workspace for freelancers and small businesses will relocate to spacious new digs in the Arlington Towers at the corner of Arlington Avenue and West First Street in Reno. The group will retain its current leased space on Lander Street near the Nevada Museum of Art if there is sufficient demand or until they can find another tenant to replace them, says longtime member Michael Henderson, who operates a video production company called Arborglyph there.

The 5,100-square-foot space in the Arlington Towers will be wide open for use by the largest portion of the Collective’s 62 members, its so-called café members who come and go without a dedicated workspace. It will also include a kitchen, coffee bar and a few small conference rooms with doors for making phone calls, enclosures converted from changing rooms used by the previous tenant, a sporting goods store.

Henderson says the bigger, communal space will make the Collective an even better venue for cooperation among people who would otherwise be working alone from home or a noisy coffee shop.

“The advantage for freelancers and people like me is collaborating with other people,” says Henderson. “It’s much more than a place to go to work. We work on creating community.”

The new space will also house several startups, says Henderson, including a microcontroller maker called Pinocchi, a brand-design firm called Saint Pierre, and TrainerRoad, which sells software for keeping tabs on cyclist training.

In addition to housing new companies, the Collective has helped spawn a couple. Henderson launched a second start-up called Causebot with fellow Collective member Jared Andrus. The pair developed software that lets people convert and donate vacation time to local charities. And Henderson says another Collective-inspired start-up is Cloudsnap, which has created a single interface for developers to add features to applications.

Cloudsnap is the offspring of Colin Loretz and Christopher Yoder, who with John Jusayan and Donald Morrison, also own the Collective.

This isn’t the Collective’s first move. The cooperative, incorporated in 2009, started out at 250 Bell Street and moved to Lander Street about two years ago. The move, though, will mean the hiring of the Collective’s first employee. Ann Kuhn, a member, who will become the office manager.