“We likely could have found it nationally,” Trumble said, “but it demanded a moment of pause and reflection (on) whether the community, ultimately represented by its funders, wanted what we were doing in Omaha.”

She concluded that it did not and decided to pursue other opportunities. She now lives in California, contributing to a revitalization project along an 11-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River — a project in the same vein as what she’d hoped to accomplish in Omaha.

“Anne’s vision and experience allowed her, and motivated her, to think about end games in a place that was just starting to get acquainted with what’s possible,” said Lyn Wallin Ziegenbein, who advocated for Emerging Terrain as executive director of the Peter Kiewit Foundation and more recently in her role as director emeritus. “Maybe we’re not curious enough as a community about what could be.”

As nonprofits go, Emerging Terrain might have been a hard sell. The organization — essentially Trumble, a few paid fellows and a number of volunteers — urged people to talk about their city as a whole, rather than through historic divisions of north, south, east and west. It encouraged Omahans to stop waiting for what will happen to the city and start imagining what it could become.