Thrive Dispatches

Isolation among families is usually discussed as a feeling. This conversation puts it somewhere more

concrete: in what a community has built and kept.

Laura Huerta Migus is Director of Fellowship Alumni Engagement and National Activation & Impact at

Ascend at the Aspen Institute. Before that she spent more than a decade leading the Association of

Children’s Museums. In this episode of Thrive Dispatches she joins Dr. Matt Biel to talk about the places

families have left.

She works from a simple taxonomy. First spaces are homes. Second spaces are the ones we have to go

to, 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 and

alone. There are no sidewalks. Getting to a third space is not tenable, or the space was developed out

during 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 by

what 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 their

best attendance years, because they were outdoors and open. Take away nearly every option and

people 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 most

communities “designed for children on their terms.” A pediatrician’s office is not. Neither is a child

welfare office. Neither is a classroom, at least not through a child’s own agency, and neither are most

playgrounds.

In this video episode of Thrive Together, hosts Maya Smith and Jason Lehmbeck speak with

Rebecca Ralston, Senior Director of Early Childhood and Preventive Health at Special

Olympics, and an alumna of the Thrive Center’s Innovation Hub fellowship. Young Athletes, the

early childhood program she has led for ten years, reaches about 350,000 children across more

than 170 countries. Roughly 53 million children under five have intellectual and developmental

disabilities.

The guiding theme of the conversation: ask first, then build. When the idea for a Young Athletes

app met resistance inside the organization, Rebecca’s team went back to the drawing board

and ran listening sessions with families, early childhood experts, and health providers. “Let’s not

let the app be the end goal, but let’s see what families need, and if the app meets that, then

we’ll be able to sort of fit that in.”

With Head Start, they mapped their program against the entire set of Head Start standards.

With tribal Head Start programs, they were told not to arrive with something already finished, so

they spent years co-building an indigenized Young Athletes. “So instead of just using those

foundational motor skills to build to soccer, we’re building to the tribal game.”

Efren Aguilar is a researcher and community engagement specialist at the University of California, Los

Angeles, working at the intersection of early childhood measurement, spatial epidemiology, and systems

transformation. Over a career spanning more than three decades, he has worked in domestic violence

prevention, refugee support, homelessness, public health, and early childhood systems, treating each

role 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 spent

building geographies of resilience, a way of mapping not only where communities are struggling but

where they are doing well against the odds. The work started with an observation he could not yet

explain. The same neighborhoods kept surfacing across unrelated data sets and methodologies, and

funders were reading those concentrations as need. Concentrated hardship, he argued, is only half the

measure. It says nothing about what people on the ground have already solved.

In this video episode of Thrive Together, hosts Maya Smith and Jason Lehmbeck speak with Maria Barrera, Co-Founder and CEO of Clayful and an alumna of the Thrive Center’s Innovation Hub fellowship. Clayful partners with schools, its financial and distribution partners, to give students across the country on-demand coaching by text.

Young people hear the statistics about a youth mental health crisis and conclude that other people need the help more than they do. So they wait, the problem grows, and by the time they reach out, it’s become severe.

Clayful launches to every student in a school, not only the ones already flagged, and it sets the threshold for a conversation as low as it will go. A crush counts. A new anime show counts. One student opened a chat unsure his problem was “a big enough deal.” His dog had died. “That moment of connection is actually healing, too,” Maria says.

When the threshold is that low, students that the system rarely sees show up. Maria shares that 46% of chats come from boys, and about 80% of students who identified with higher levels of anxiety on the PHQ-4 were using Clayful. The moment school partners became believers, she says, came when Clayful flagged a student who was thinking about ending their life and had never been on their radar.

The conversation also gets practical about why this works as a business. Schools are the front door to mental health, Maria says: students trust them, they are already there, and there are no transportation barriers. Because Clayful collected clinical measures from day one, prevention becomes something you can see. “You can’t retroactively create data, but if you have it, then you can retroactively analyze it and see things in the data that are pretty magical.” By her account, 90% of students who started the year low-need stayed there, twice the rate of students who did not use Clayful. And with grant funding sunsetting, Clayful is pairing school partnerships with insurance reimbursement so the support outlasts any single grant.

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?

In this video episode of Thrive Together, hosts Maya Smith and Jason Lehmbeck speak with Dr.

Mary Ann Woodruff and Rachel Lettieri, LCSW, of Pediatrics Northwest, a pediatric group that

has served families in the South Sound region of Washington for more than 50 years.

Mary Ann is a general pediatrician who saw patients for 36 years and is now the Medical

Director of Care Transformation as well as the Washington Medical Director for Reach Out and

Read.

Rachel directs Care Transformation and built the practice’s community health worker division.

Both were fellows in the Thrive Center’s Innovation Hub.

Pediatrics Northwest treats the pediatric medical home as a universal touchpoint, the one place

nearly every family returns to with their child, and uses it to bridge physical health, behavioral

health, and unmet social needs.

Community health workers from the community accompany families: they help navigate

systems like early intervention and behavioral health, reduce stressors, and build the confidence

to make a first call. The team has protected one non-billable day a week for community health

workers to be out building relationships with the resources they connect families to, a choice

they have held for four years even while billing Medicaid for those services. Their work grew

from a Medicaid waiver grant for collaborative care and behavioral health integration in 2018

and 2019, and it is part of Pediatrics Supporting Parents, a five-community national initiative

with Zero to Three to strengthen early relational health in well-child visits.

The through-line, in Mary Ann’s words: children’s brains develop in relationships, not systems,

and so our systems have to catch up with that science.

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Alison Peak, a clinical social worker

specializing in early childhood mental health and the Executive Director of Allied

Behavioral 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 a

place where predictable routines created safety even during times of scarcity, and

where 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, the

networks of relationships and predictable rhythms that decide who shows up for whom

when times get hard.

Alison’s clinical anchor is a definition she returns to often. “My favorite definition of infant

and 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. They

are the thing that determines whether a child makes it to adulthood at all.

Introducing Thrive Together — a new video podcast from the Thrive Center at Georgetown University, now appearing right here on the Thrive Dispatches feed.

Hosted by Maya Enista Smith and Jason Lembeck, Thriving Together features the same commitment to honest, solutions-focused conversation as Thrive Dispatches — with a more personal, co-hosted dynamic and a focus on the entrepreneurs, families, and practitioners building something new.

In this first episode, Maya and Jason sit down with Mallika Reddy Pajuri, co-founder and CEO of PsycheCare — a peer coaching platform that supports families in the weeks and months after a child's mental health crisis. Mallika shares how her own chronic illness shaped PsycheCare's model, why the company put parents (not clinicians) at the center, and what it looks like to build a Medicaid-focused mental health startup from the ground up — including three months living in Minnesota, a rented Jeep, and a crocheted emotional support pickle.

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.

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel speaks withDr. Sunny Patel, achild psychiatrist who recently served as Senior Advisor at SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) and as a White House Fellow, about the current state of children's behavioral health policy. In a political environment where standing behind data and science is becoming a risk, Sunny hasbravely spoken out againstmisinformation and documented theimpact of federal cuts on children's behavioral health systems.

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Jay Chaudhary, former Director of Mental Health and Addiction for Indiana, about transforming an entire state's behavioral health system. Jay describes the mental health financing system he inherited as "a house of cards built on top of a shell game," where providers were locked into rigid financial formulas that made any deviation potentially catastrophic.

Jay's journey began as a civil rights lawyer launching medical-legal partnerships that placed attorneys directly in healthcare settings to address the social drivers that keep people sick. That experience taught him that clinicians' understanding of their work transforms when they see how much their clients' lives outside the clinic affect them, and more importantly, that "we can do something about it through collaboration."

As state director, Jay discovered that incremental changes were impossible in such a fragile system. His solution was comprehensive: implementing Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs) that use cost-based reimbursement, giving providers flexibility to actually respond to community needs. The transformation required not just policy change but alignment across stakeholders, from legislators to law enforcement to providers, all using the same language: "someone to call, someone to respond, somewhere to go."

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel has a conversation with Shawn Hardness, Founder and CEO of Statesmen College Preparatory Academy for Boys in Washington, DC.

Shawn built a school that challenges everything we think we know about supporting students from high-need communities. At Statesman, 90% of students come from families engaged with public support systems, and the school serves three times the typical rate of students needing special education services. Yet these boys are thriving.

At the heart of Statesman's approach is a radical reframing: love and compassion aren't soft additions to "real" interventions. They are the intervention. This isn't about adding more services at the edges while leaving the daily lived experience of children unchanged. It's about building love and trust and relationships into the architecture of every day, protecting it in budgets and schedules with the same fierce commitment schools typically reserve for academic outcomes.

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky, who leads New Mexico's Early Childhood Education and Care Department, the first cabinet-level department of its kind in the country. When she arrived in New Mexico in 2019, the state ranked 50th in many national measures of child wellbeing. Now they're building what many see as a national model for early childhood systems change.Secretary Groginsky shares her journey from program evaluator to systems change leader, exploring how she launched a new department during the pandemic and how New Mexico uses population-level data to drive community action. At the heart of their approach is a fundamental insight: you can't expect different results when the people delivering care can barely support their own families.The conversation reveals how New Mexico has transformed its approach to early childhood through bold investments in workforce compensation, creating wage parity for pre-K teachers, establishing comprehensive wage scales across all early childhood programs, and providing free college for early childhood professionals. These aren't incremental improvements but represent a fundamental shift in how a state values its early childhood workforce.

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Dr. Susan Swick, Executive Director of the Ohana Center for Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health on California's Monterey Peninsula. Dr. Swick is building a comprehensive mental health ecosystem for her region.

Rather than simply expanding services that are reactive to crises facing young people, she's creating a model that integrates promotion of emotional wellbeing, prevention of mental health challenges, treatment for those who are struggling, and engagement with the community. Her approach challenges fundamental assumptions about how we deliver mental healthcare to children, adolescents, and families.

The conversation includes insights about creating spaces that spark curiosity rather than stigma, and outlines a powerful intervention model that brings entire family systems together in moments of crisis.

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Dr. Maya Coleman, Director of Hand in Hand Parenting and faculty member at the Thrive Center. Hand in Hand is an international organization that has been supporting families for 35 years across nearly 40 countries.Dr. Coleman brings a unique perspective shaped by her experiences as both a clinical child psychologist and as a parent who discovered firsthand that professional expertise doesn't automatically make the work of caregiving any easier. The conversation explores what it really means for communities to support thriving in young children, why working with children is inherently emotional work, and how we can help the adults in children's lives navigate that emotional complexity.Through Hand in Hand's approach, Dr. Coleman teaches adults how to listen to children and to each other in ways that build warm, attuned, and responsive relationships. The organization's five concrete listening tools help families and educators create conditions where emotions can be expressed and processed within caring relationships.

In the first episode of season 2 we’re talking about video games. More specifically we’re speaking with Dr. Lynn Fiellin Play2Prevent Lab about how their video games are used as tools for substance use prevention in adolescents and health education.

Through five games developed with young people as co-designers, Dr. Fiellin's team creates virtual environments where teens can experience the consequences of their choices safely and develop an understanding of risk, build refusal skills while maintaining social standing, and recognize that one mistake doesn't define their path forward.

This episode explores how gaming combined with research and youth partnership, can transform prevention science—meeting young people where they are and speaking their language to promote not just survival, but thriving.

Thriving isn’t a solo act. In this closing conversation, host Matt Biel looks back on 11 episodes that help shape how Thrive Center pursues its mission.

Anchored in Dr. Jack Shonkoff’s insight that thriving is “the match (or mismatch) between what’s unique about each child and the environment that child is living in,” Matt revisits the season’s most resonant lessons on collective transformation.

From Maria Vasquez on communities forging resilience before systems catch up, to Jen Drake Croft’s philosophy of walking alongside rather than leading from above, and Jason Lembeck’s call to “shrink that time to community,” the episode traces a clear through-line: relationships are our greatest asset when resources are tight and systems are strained.

Listen in as Thrive Center recommits to its role as a connective tissue that honors local expertise, resists scarcity thinking, and creates intentional spaces for collaboration and mutual support. The closing question for every listener: in times of disruption, how do we build something better together?

There’s no impact without funding. This week. Thrive Dispatches Podcast explores the family-centered approaches to mental health through the lens of impact investing.

Our guest is Louise Langheier, founder of Luminary Impact Fund, the first venture capital philanthropy fund dedicated exclusively to family mental health. Louise brings a unique perspective shaped by personal experiences and decades of social impact work, including co-founding Peer Health Exchange, which now serves over half a million young people annually.

When most of the industry prioritizes individual-focused models, Louise's work makes a strong case for family-centered approaches to mental health care.

This conversation reveals why family-centered approaches to mental health remain surprisingly scarce despite their obvious importance, examining the structural obstacles in payment systems, the cultural individualism that shapes American healthcare, and the innovative leaders who are breaking through these barriers with creative new models of care.

🎧 Building Community Through Culture: A Conversation with the Navajo Nation
In this special extended episode of Thrive Dispatches, we explore how culturally grounded partnerships can drive sustainable change in early childhood mental health. Host Matt is joined by Thrive Center’s Jen Drake-Croft, who introduces a powerful conversation with Kim Kee and Charnielle Desiderio—two inspiring leaders from the Navajo Nation who helped guide the transformative work of Project I-LAUNCH.

Together, they reflect on building trust with Indigenous communities, adapting evidence-based practices through cultural lenses (including Positive Diné Parenting), and how traditional practices like cradleboarding support infant wellness. You’ll also hear how these efforts continue today through community collaboration, storytelling, and systems change—long after the original grant ended.

🧠 Themes include:

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Indigenous-led approaches to mental health

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Culturally adapted parenting programs

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Cradleboard practices and early development

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Long-term sustainability through relationships and respect

Whether you're a parent, educator, or advocate for culturally responsive care, this episode offers deep insight into the power of partnership and cultural humility.