Listen to the podcast here:

In honor of Juneteenth, we’re sharing something special: the opening chapter of Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life, the podcast hosted by legendary equity advocate Angela Glover Blackwell, founder in residence of PolicyLink. In “Democracy Dreaming,” Angela takes us to Los Angeles, a city she didn’t expect to become a hopeful case study in multiracial democracy, and shows us why it might be exactly that. Featuring voices from LA Mayor Karen Bass, economist Manuel Pastor, Community Coalition CEO Alberto Retana, young housing organizer Tiffany Benitez, advocate Denise Fairchild, and the poetry of Chinaka Hodge, this episode reframes democracy not as something we have, but as something we practice. Angela’s second season is coming soon, and we’re thrilled to share that we’ll be sitting down with Angela herself in early July, with that conversation releasing later next month. Got a question you’d love us to ask her? Send it to hello@caremorebebetter.com.

Chapter Markers (relative timestamps, mapped from the original episode)

• 3:09 — Why Angela’s spent half a century in this work
• 4:07 — Memory of the municipal opera, and being shielded from hate
• 4:53 — Newsreel montage: January 6th, book bans, voting rights battles
• 5:26 — Reframing the conversation: realizing democracy’s potential, not just naming its threats
• 6:07 — Why multiracial democracy means everybody, including white people
• 6:21 — Chinaka Hodge’s poem, “All Power to the People”
• 6:56 — Welcome to Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life
• 7:26 — Why Los Angeles: the election of Mayor Karen Bass
• 8:17 — What draws Angela to Bass’s leadership style
• 8:56 — Defining “human flourishing”
• 9:17 — The decades of organizing behind one election
• 9:46 — LA’s origins: Indigenous land, Mexican founders, Asian Pacific Islander neighborhoods, the Great Migration
• 11:21 — The brutality beneath the diversity: stolen land, segregation, racial violence
• 11:41 — A history of protest: Watts 1965, East LA walkouts 1968, the 1992 uprising
• 12:38 — Manuel Pastor on the lessons organizers drew from 1992
• 13:41 — How modern LA’s multiracial coalition-building emerged
• 14:16 — Alberto Retana on unity, struggle, and naming the real opposition
• 15:20 — What actually makes LA’s leadership unique
• 16:12 — The reality check: LA’s poverty, homelessness, and housing crisis
• 17:10 — Tiffany Benitez’s story: displacement in Boyle Heights
• 19:10 — Tiffany on organizing as the answer to insecurity
• 20:04 — Denise Fairchild on what it means to flourish
• 21:16 — Interconnectedness: democracy, people, and planet
• 21:42 — Chinaka Hodge’s poem, on what we’re owed and what we want
• 22:33 — The Constitution’s contradiction, and its capacity to grow
• 23:23 — The bigger question: can any democracy ever fully serve a diverse population?
• 23:39 — Why LA, and why this matters beyond LA
• 24:43 — Preview of next chapter: “There’s No I in Leader”
• 25:17 — Credits and closing reflection on voting

Resources & Links

• Follow Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life: wherever you listen to podcasts
  Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reimagining-democracy-for-a-good-life/id1742644681
• Radical Imagination Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/radicalimagination.us/
• Learn more about PolicyLink: https://www.policylink.org/
• Have a question for our upcoming interview with Angela Glover Blackwell? Email hello@caremorebebetter.com
• Protest Interview with Annie Leonard and Andre Carothers: https://caremorebebetter.com/if-we-lose-the-right-to-protest-we-lose-everything-with-annie-leonard-andre-carothers/

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About Angela Glover Blackwell:

Angela Glover Blackwell started PolicyLink in 1999 with a mission of advancing racial and economic equity for all. Through her writing, speaking, and leadership, Angela has helped to grow and define a national equity movement focused on innovating and improving public policy with a wide range of partners to ensure access and opportunity for all low-income people and communities of color – particularly in the areas of building an equitable economy, health, housing, transportation, infrastructure, and arts and culture. Prior to founding PolicyLink, Angela served as Senior Vice President at the Rockefeller Foundation, where she oversaw the foundation’s Domestic and Cultural programs. A lawyer by training, she gained national recognition as founder of the Oakland (CA) Urban Strategies Council, where she pioneered new approaches to neighborhood revitalization. From 1977 to 1987, she was a partner at Public Advocates, a nationally known public interest law firm.

As a leading voice in the movement for equity in America, Angela is a frequent commentator for some of the nation’s top news organizations, including The New York Times, HuffPost, Washington Post, Salon, and CNN, and was most recently published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. She has appeared regularly on such programs as public radio’s Marketplace, The Tavis Smiley Show, Nightline, and PBS’s Now. Angela has also been a guest on the PBS series Moyers & Company and PBS’s NewsHour. She appeared in the sixth and final segment of the PBS six-part series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Crosswith Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and in Bob Herbert’s Chasing the Dream: The Fight for A Black Middle Class.

Angela 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. A co-author of Uncommon Common Ground: Race and America’s Future (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010), Angela also contributed to What It’s Worth: Strengthening the Financial Future of Families, Communities and the Nation (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and CFED, 2015), Worlds Apart: Poverty and Politics in Rural America (Yale University Press, 2014, second edition), and Ending Poverty in America: How to Restore the American Dream (The New Press, 2007), among others. In 2013, Angela and PolicyLink collaborated with the Center for American Progress to produce All-In Nation: An America that Works for All.

Angela serves on numerous boards, including the Children’s Defense Fund, the W. Haywood Burns Institute, the U.S. Water Alliance, Pitzer College, and FSG. She also advises the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve as one of 15 members of its Community Advisory Council. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Howard University, and a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Juneteenth Feature: Angela Glover Blackwell’s Reimagining Democracy For A Good Life – Episode 1: Los Angeles

Opening Transcript:

Welcome regenerators!

Each week, we explore the intersection of sustainability, justice, and regenerative thinking, looking at the impacts of our food, beauty, and lifestyle choices on people and planet, and how, in being more intentional, we truly can become the most influential drivers of positive change on this planet.

Today, on Juneteenth, I’m bringing you a bonus episode. It won’t be my voice carrying the conversation. Instead, I’m sharing the opening episode of a podcast I believe every single one of you needs in your feed: Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life, hosted by the legendary Angela Glover Blackwell.

If you don’t know Angela’s name yet, you certainly should. She is the founder in residence of PolicyLink, the racial and economic equity organization she started in 1999 after a career that already included serving as senior vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, founding the Urban Strategies Council in Oakland, and a decade as a partner at the public interest law firm Public Advocates. She’s a lawyer by training, an organizer by instinct, and has been doing the work of equity and justice for more than half a century. She’s also a professor of practice at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, and this is her second podcast. Her first, Radical Imagination, has already built a devoted following for tackling big ideas like reparations and universal basic income.

In this first episode of Reimagining Democracy, “Democracy Dreaming,” Angela takes us to Los Angeles, a city she did not expect to become a hopeful case study in multiracial democracy, and shows us why it might be exactly that. You’ll hear from LA Mayor Karen Bass, economist Manuel Pastor, Community Coalition CEO Alberto Retana, young housing organizer Tiffany Benitez, and advocate Denise Fairchild. You’ll also hear the poetry of Chinaka Hodge woven through, because as Angela makes clear, democracy isn’t just policy. It’s culture. It’s struggle. It’s all of us.

On a day when we’re collectively reflecting on freedom, on what’s been won and what’s still being fought for, I can’t think of a more fitting conversation to share. As you listen, I encourage you to think about what questions you might have for Angela – as I’ll be interviewing her on this podcast in early July. You can send your questions in directly to me via email. Send your questions to hello@caremorebebetter.com. I’ll also include this address in show notes.

So here it is, in Angela’s own words, from her podcast: Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life.

The Transcript of Democracy Dreamin’ can be found on PolicyLink.com. Here is the direct link:

Democracy Dreamin’ | 1

Closing Transcript:

That was Chapter One of Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life, “Democracy Dreaming,” from Angela Glover Blackwell.

I hope this gave you as much to sit with as it gave me. Angela’s reminder that unity requires struggle, that democracy is a practice and not a possession. That feels like exactly the right note to land on this Juneteenth.

If this resonated with you, go find Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life wherever you listen to podcasts and follow it now. Season two is coming soon, and you do not want to miss it.

And here’s something to look forward to: I’ll be sitting down with Angela myself in early July, and we’ll be releasing that conversation right here on Care More Be Better. If there’s something specific you’d love for me to ask her, something about her journey, about PolicyLink, about what she’s learned reimagining democracy city by city, I want to hear it. Send your questions to hello@caremorebebetter.com and I’ll do my best to bring them into our conversation.

Democracy isn’t a destination. It’s a practice we return to, again and again, especially on the days it asks the most of us.

Until next time, keep dreaming bigger, keep showing up, and keep finding ways to care more and be better. I’m Corinna Bellizzi, and this has been Care More Be Better.