Rock Island resident Annika O’Melia wants to be more involved in her community, and with years of experience as a therapist, she figured she could use her skill set to dive deep into how people are striving to improve the city through long-form conversations. Thus, the creation of the Rock Island Line, a podcast and website hub covering city operations, and highlighting residents improving the community.
“I think the big world can feel really overwhelming. Everything going on nationally and internationally, and at this stage of my life, feeling a little bit lost about how do you affect change? How do you be a part of something? And I love Rock Island so much,” O’Melia said in an interview with WVIK regarding the thought process behind creating the podcast in June 2025. “[I]t was kind of like this train that came through Rock Island, famous and historical, but also this line that connects us all, this invisible force of the history of Rock Island.”
O’Melia has spoken to various members and leaders of the city, including Mayor Ashley Harris, local pastor Rob McCoy, The Green Store grocery corner store owner Demetrius Johnson, and poet Aubrey Barnes.
“I think my episode with Don Wooten (Founder of WVIK), which was my very first episode, is a great one to start with because it's long form. It's giving this Rock Islander an opportunity to talk about his life, what he believes, these core questions about what it is to be in community and to have a good life,” O’Melia said.
During her podcast’s first season, she wanted to continue being a blank slate, citing her therapy practice, and be neutral. However, after speaking with Christie Adamson, co-founder of the nonprofit The Third Place QC, she was captivated by the issue of housing.
“And the issue of the housing brought up for me that, like, oh, I have a lot of opinions, and in therapy, you can't share those. You're really helping the person across from you deeply understand themselves. And in this role as a podcaster, just noticing how strongly I feel about certain things in my community. And so that became a topic for me that was totally out of left field,” O’Melia said. “And I really care about the social service license ordinance, what that looks like, sitting in the historical context of ordinances that have a tendency to more deeply impact people of color, people with disabilities, people who have survived domestic violence, people struggling with mental health issues. And if we look at the history of the ugly laws, where if you were disabled, you couldn't be in public. Or sundown towns, where if you had a certain skin color, it was like, we can't have people like that out in the world. We need to hide them away so we feel safe or that we think that our downtowns are appealing. And so I really got into that issue.”
Other community members and leaders O’Melia would like to sit down with are 3rd Ward Alderwoman Linda Barnes and, if possible, national figures to connect national issues with local solutions.
“We touch every part of American history, from the relocation and pushing out of indigenous people, to civil rights, to the closing of the factories, to integration, to how tech is gonna shape this community,” O’Melia said. “And I think we're just, we're kind of like a global city with our high rate of immigrants who live here, our high school, 33 languages are spoken. So I feel like we're just this really unique place that I think other people in a more national landscape might be interested in. Because it's like, well, if we could make policy work in Rock Island, you could do it anywhere, you know, because we, we bring all the ingredients of America into one setting. We are diverse economically, religiously, and politically.”
Those dream guests include lawyer and former Secretary of Labor, under then-President Bill Clinton, Robert Reich, and former President Barack Obama.
O’Melia is focusing on neighborhood associations in her next conversation with Marisa Cantú, a community organizer with the Community Caring Conference (CCC).
“And I really wanted to have her on because our current mayor, Ashley Harris, is very interested in reinvigorating neighborhood associations. They used to be very strong in Rock Island a decade or so ago, and they've kind of fallen by the wayside,” O’Melia said. “I'm so interested in how neighborhoods and communities come together to organize, to vision, cast, to think about. What do we want here to convey to city council? And I think part of my role is documenting, witnessing, and observing. Then how responsive is a city to its residents? Who are they working for? Are they incorporating what a community says they want into the policies that they carry out? And what vehicles do we have for that dialogue and communication?
“So we need more therapeutic or shared space, ways to dialogue with our neighbors about not just yelling into the wind or making comments on Facebook, but in person, for stakeholders to be able to do collective decision making in ways where people actually feel their humanity is seen and heard. And so I think that's interesting, too, to think about creating physical spaces to do that work.”
O’Melia focuses on Rock Island but hopes her podcast inspires other community members to get involved and push for more transparent, open communication with residents and their respective municipalities.
“Because what I really think the point of Rock Island Line is to engage with the city that you live in, to be critically engaged, to think about stuff, to analyze it, to disagree, to be a little bit messy, actually, so that if across the lifespan and in different corners of the city, more people were having conversations that would make me really, really happy. And I recognize I am not doing it perfectly, but, yeah, I'm enjoying it.”
Rock Island Line podcast episodes and latest stories can be found here.
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