Rosa Washington Olson grew up in the South and has lived in Davis for nearly half a century. She taught school for decades, earned advanced academic degrees, and as a public speaker she can engage people with warmth, understanding, and purpose—and challenge them with blunt facts. She grew up in a strong family amid “a time of overt racism,” she says, “but we had parents who shielded us from that hostility, and they always said to us ‘you are somebody. You will be somebody.’ ”

She has endured racism countless times, including in Davis. “Everything in the South was overt. You knew. All of the other places away from the South, hid behind the South, with their subtle, latent racism. People who went north thought they were going somewhere and realized they ran into the same kind, but in a different way.”

She also says she loves life and enjoys people, and wants to encourage, motivate and build bridges with other people. She likes Davis. The community of church is important to her (she started going to the Davis United Methodist Church in 1972). And she remains hopeful. “We are not to forget society,” she says. “It’s not an I and it’s not a me, it’s us together.”

The civic project to define what downtown Davis should be in 2040 is making progress. Meg Arnold and Michelle Byars, chair and vice chair of the Downtown Davis Plan Advisory Committee, described the effort on Davisville in April, and today they return with an update on what they've heard so far—about the idea that streets downtown feel too much alike, how to design housing so a wide range of people could live there, coming up with plans that people can count on, what neighbors and property owners want, and how all this work will fit with the rest of the city. They've received about 3,000 comments to date--and that doesn't include whatever they'll hear at the next participatory design workshop this week.