Alum—Then & Now
Angela Glover Blackwell got her start in public interest law at Public Advocates where she was a managing attorney from 1977 through 1987. Finely tuned in to the community pulse and known for her unstoppable determination to right the wrongs she observed and had experienced herself, Angela led some of PA’s most impactful advocacy and litigation during her years at the organization. Among her most prominent issue areas were racial and gender discrimination in employment, access to healthy food in low-income communities of color, infant mortality and nutrition, and consumer protections.
In these excerpts from an interview with Angela done in April of 2021, she talks about her first experiences at PA, some of the key issues she and the organization addressed and what she took away from her ten years working alongside the founders and staff of Public Advocates during its early years. By the time Angela left Public Advocates, her work on food access in low-income communities of color and the flight from those communities by major food chains, as well as her administrative advocacy around problems of high infant mortality & infant nutrition were legendary.
Nationally known as a leading voice in the movement for equity in America, Angela Glover Blackwell is currently Founder in Residence at PolicyLink, the organization she started in 1999 to advance racial and economic equity for all.
Under Angela’s leadership, PolicyLink gained national prominence in the movement to use public policy to improve access and opportunity for all low-income people and communities of color, particularly in the areas of health, housing, transportation, and infrastructure. Angela is also the host of the Radical Imagination podcast and Professor of Practice at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley.
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.
