Editor’s note: This interview took place before the Sept. 1 death of Barbara Ehrenreich, the co-founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Alissa Quart is, admittedly, “obsessed with other people.” It’s a quality that serves her well as a journalist, author and now the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP), which she founded with the late Barbara Ehrenreich in 2012.“

If you believe what we have on Earth is all there is, journalism is a form of secular faith,” Quart says. With a “profound curiosity in others” that developed from an early age, she always wanted to know and share people’s stories, including a gym teacher she interviewed when she was just 8.

Quart’s introduction to EHRP came when she worked on a short documentary called “The Last Clinic” about the abortion clinic in Mississippi that became the center of the recent Dobbs Supreme Court decision.

Listen to the full interview on the It’s All Journalism podcast.