The sheer volume of awful things that have happened in recent months makes a person wonder if we’ll ever get it right. For Angela Glover Blackwell, a lifelong advocate for social and economic justice and the host of the Radical Imagination podcast, now is the perfect moment to discuss deep-seated issues such as reparations, extreme poverty, and police misconduct. But it’s not all talk: “What we’re doing is finding the people who are not just wishing for [change], but making it happen,” she told us on Ep. 67 of our At a Distance podcast. So far, she’s interviewed Stockton, California, mayor Michael Tubbs about his guaranteed income initiative, as well as Darrick Hamilton, who’s advising the government on how to enact a federal job guarantee. In a recent episode, she unpacks the water crisis that disproportionately affects Black, brown, and indigenous communities in the U.S., urging listeners to think about the human rights of H₂O.

Blackwell acknowledges that a lot of the things she calls “radical” on the podcast aren’t really that radical at all: Anyone who wants to work should be able to get a job. Communities should be safe. Everyone should have access to education. But because “we’re so used to not getting enough,” she says, it seems profound when we make these things a reality. “We need to have the radical imagination to think that we can achieve the ideals that were put out by the nation at its founding,” Blackwell says. “Obviously the founding fathers didn’t believe it, because they didn’t take the steps that they could have taken to realize it. But they were good words. They were good ideas. I think now we’re finally at a point where we can breathe life into them.”