S1E18 - Angela Glover Blackwell - Realizing the Promise of Equity
We met with Angela Glover Blackwell, Founder-in-Residence of PolicyLink, host of the Radical Imagination Podcast and Professor of Practice at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, to reflect on a career dedicated to building a more equitable society. Blackwell believes that authentically rooting oneself in close proximity to the experience of the most vulnerable populations allows one to see how to improve circumstances for everyone. These are unprecedented times with unprecedented threats, but we also see unprecedented engagement and a novel brand of unprecedented “collective leadership” that fuels today’s powerful social movements and renewal. Join us to understand her passionate optimism, and hear her four key changes that would lead to meaningful progress towards a better world for all.
Prior to founding PolicyLink, Angela served as Senior Vice President at The Rockefeller Foundation. A lawyer by training, she gained national recognition as founder of the Urban Strategies Council. From 1977 to 1987, Angela was a partner at Public Advocates. Angela is the co-author of Uncommon Common Ground: Race and America’s Future, and she authored The Curb Cut Effect, published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2017.
As a leading voice in the movement for equity in America, Angela serves on numerous boards. She advised the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve as one of 15 members of its inaugural Community Advisory Council, and in 2020 was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to the state Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery. She is the 2018 recipient of the John W. Gardner Leadership Award, presented by the Independent Sector, and in 2017, she received the Peter E. Haas Public Service Award from the University of California, Berkeley.
Conversation recorded on December 2, 2022.