Thrive Dispatches

Isolation among families is usually discussed as a feeling. This conversation puts it somewhere moreconcrete: in what a community has built and kept.Laura Huerta Migus is Director of Fellowship Alumni Engagement and National Activation & Impact atAscend at the Aspen Institute. Before that she spent more than a decade leading the Association ofChildren’s Museums. In this episode of Thrive Dispatches she joins Dr. Matt Biel to talk about the placesfamilies have left.She works from a simple taxonomy. First spaces are homes. Second spaces are the ones we have to goto, like hospitals and schools. Third spaces are the ones we choose. Those are the ones going away.She is specific about how. Across much of the country, people get from place to place in a vehicle andalone. There are no sidewalks. Getting to a third space is not tenable, or the space was developed outduring the urban design process.We tend to read the result as a set of private choices. She does not. A parent’s options are limited bywhat their community is able to offer them, and that comes down to investment.Then there is the evidence from lockdown. Zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens had some of theirbest attendance years, because they were outdoors and open. Take away nearly every option andpeople did not stay home. They went to the one that was left.Children’s museums are her counterexample. She calls them one of the only spaces in mostcommunities “designed for children on their terms.” A pediatrician’s office is not. Neither is a childwelfare office. Neither is a classroom, at least not through a child’s own agency, and neither are mostplaygrounds.

Rebecca Ralston, Senior Director of Early Childhood and Preventive Health at Special Olympics and founder of Young Athletes, leads global inclusion for young children with and without disabilities. She recounts scaling an in-person program into a global app, listening to families to redesign solutions, partnering with systems like Head Start, and balancing digital tools with real caregiver-to-caregiver connection.

Efren Aguilar is a researcher and community engagement specialist at the University of California, LosAngeles, working at the intersection of early childhood measurement, spatial epidemiology, and systemstransformation. Over a career spanning more than three decades, he has worked in domestic violenceprevention, refugee support, homelessness, public health, and early childhood systems, treating eachrole as a study of a different stage of human development.In this episode of Thrive Dispatches, Aguilar joins Dr. Matt Biel to discuss the 15 years he has spentbuilding geographies of resilience, a way of mapping not only where communities are struggling butwhere they are doing well against the odds. The work started with an observation he could not yetexplain. The same neighborhoods kept surfacing across unrelated data sets and methodologies, andfunders were reading those concentrations as need. Concentrated hardship, he argued, is only half themeasure. It says nothing about what people on the ground have already solved.

Maria Barrera, Co-founder and CEO of Clayful and leader at the intersection of education and youth mental health, talks about making on-demand text coaching available to every student. She explains why low-threshold texting uncovers unseen needs, how schools become the front door to care, and how early data proves prevention scales and convinces partners.

Dr. Shabab Wahid is an assistant professor of global health at Georgetown University’s School of Health and a global mental health researcher working at the intersection of culture, climate, and wellbeing, with active studies in Bangladesh, Kenya, Senegal, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.In this episode of Thrive Dispatches, Dr. Wahid joins Dr. Matt Biel to explore what cross-cultural science tells us about how people experience mental distress. They start with the study that drew Wahid into the field, in which people with schizophrenia in the United States described voices that were harsh and punitive, while people in India and Ghana described companions and friends.They then trace his research in Bangladesh linking sustained heat, separated statistically from floods and storms, to depression and anxiety, and the grief he documents in communities watching their home environments change in front of their eyes.And they dig into his central methodological contribution: how to build mental health interventions that communities recognize, trust, and want to use. That means learning how a community understands the mind, which words people use for distress, and what a good outcome looks like in local terms, from addressing tension in South Asia to supporting a calm heart in Senegal. The lesson of the conversation is a sequence: listen first, then adapt, then treat. A clinic for depression sees no visitors due to stigma; a program for tension brings people back, with friends or spouses at the second session. The sequence holds at home too, down to the question therapists in Nepal ask their young clients: depression like normal depression, or depression where you need help?

Rachel Lettieri, LCSW, built a community health worker program and leads family-centered behavioral health innovation. Dr. Mary Ann Woodruff, pediatrician and care transformation director, has decades in community pediatrics. They discuss using the pediatric medical home to bridge health, behavior, and social needs. They highlight accompaniment over referrals, protecting non-billable outreach time, and practical steps to scale relational, team-based care.

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Alison Peak, a clinical social workerspecializing in early childhood mental health and the Executive Director of AlliedBehavioral Health Solutions, a behavioral health practice with sites across Tennessee.Before any of that, Alison grew up deep in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, in aplace where predictable routines created safety even during times of scarcity, andwhere relationships were the foundation of a wide web of informal support.In their conversation, Alison and Matt explore the difference between formal systems,the agencies with long acronyms and eligibility requirements, and the informal ones, thenetworks of relationships and predictable rhythms that decide who shows up for whomwhen times get hard.Alison’s clinical anchor is a definition she returns to often. “My favorite definition of infantand early childhood mental health is the capacity to love well and grow well.”For young children, she explains, relationships are not one factor among many. Theyare the thing that determines whether a child makes it to adulthood at all.

Mallika Reddy Pajjuri, co-founder and CEO of PsycheCare and entrepreneur focused on Medicaid mental health solutions. She recounts how chronic illness inspired a parent-centered peer coaching model. Conversations cover why parents, not clinicians, are central; designing supports after emergency discharge; on-the-ground Minnesota fieldwork; and strategies for selling into hospitals and partnering with payers.

This week, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Jamal Berry, President and CEO of Educare DC, a model early childhood program serving more than 375 children prenatal to age five across two campuses and partner sites in Wards 7 and 8 of Washington, DC. Jamal joined Educare DC in 2013 as an infant and toddler mentor teacher and has moved through nearly every layer of leadership since. He is also an Ascend Fellow at the Aspen Institute.In their conversation, Jamal and Matt talk about what drew Jamal to early childhood work in the first place (his mother, the first in her family to attend college and the kind of person who always pulled out an extra plate at Sunday dinner), and what has kept him there. They explore what it really means to close the opportunity gap, not only for the children Educare serves but for the families and communities around them. As Jamal puts it: “We’re the workforce behind the workforce.”

This week, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Dr. Christine Page-Lopez, Associate Medical Director at Neighborhood Health community health centers in Northern Virginia and the Virginia Medical Director for Reach Out and Read. Dr. Page-Lopez also holds a master's degree in public health and works at the intersection of primary care, community building and advocacy.In their conversation, Christine and Matt talk about how holding both a clinical and public health perspective shapes her practice, how she sees partnerships with schools and community organizations as critical to her ability to take care of her patients, and how she's working to shift pediatric care from a model focused on illness and threats to health to one that emphasizes family strengths and children's innate capacities for connection and resilience.