You Don’t Know If You Don’t Go

Juliana Ciano’s willingness to follow momentum transformed one recycling experiment into a community where waste becomes soil, soil becomes food, and people become partners.

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Reunity Resources began with an experiment: could used cooking oil become biodiesel instead of waste? For co-founder Juliana Ciano, that question opened doors—into composting, farming, education, food access, and a community that could participate in its own solutions.

The journey was not straightforward. When Ciano and her husband, Tejinder, proposed collecting restaurant food scraps, they discovered that Santa Fe legally classified those scraps as city-owned trash. After two years of meetings and paperwork, Reunity received permission to begin. Then no restaurants signed up.

Progress arrived through relationships. Six restaurant owners agreed to try the system, cr

eating proof that separating food waste was not more work, only different work. One pilot became a collection network. One school cafeteria became every Santa Fe public school cafeteria. Scraps became compost, compost regenerated soil, and that soil produced food for families, institutions, and hunger-relief partners.

The same pattern created Reunity’s community refrigerator. People sent Ciano stories about fridges stocked with free food. A donor offered startup money. Shortly after that, Reunity placed a refrigerator outside its farm, available around the clock with no questions asked. Neighbors began stocking, cleaning, and using it. 

Ciano describes this work as listening for momentum. An idea appears, people gather around it, and Reunity builds the structure that allows participation. Not every attempt succeeds, but its failures have produced principles: test before investing, fail forward, and choose progress over perfection.

Her axiom is an invitation: you don’t know if you don’t go. Good ideas rarely arrive fully formed. They emerge when people leave home, enter conversations, notice connections and risk saying yes. A handful of scraps, one willing partner or a secondhand refrigerator may be enough to begin.

For more information about Reunity Resources, visit them at https://www.reunityresources.com