With a career as a math teacher under her belt, Olive began a second career fighting for an improved quality of life in her community, taking on corporations and government entities by organizing the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development, a nonprofit group fighting for quality-of-life issues on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Organizing rallies, lobbying politicians and raising funds for lawyers and experts are only some of the strategies she still uses working with this group that she helped found more than three decades ago.