Thrive Dispatches

Welcome to Thrive Dispatches, a podcast that explores the stories behind helping children, families, and communities thrive. Join host Dr. Matt Biel, director of Georgetown University's Thrive Center, as he connects with researchers, clinicians, community leaders, and families who are reimagining mental health and well-being.Each episode brings together diverse perspectives and innovative approaches that are transforming how we support child and family mental health.

Thrive Dispatches is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 27 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Thrive Dispatches, a business show with 27 episodes published.

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  Episode #12

  Geographies of Resilience (with Efren Aguilar)

  Aug 12, 202634 minS2

  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.

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  Episode #3

  A Big Enough Deal (with Maria Barrera)

  Jul 29, 202646 minS1

  In this video episode of Thriving 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.

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  Episode #11

  When Culture Meets Climate: A New Map for Mental Health (with Dr. Shabab Wahid)

  Jul 15, 202633 minS2

  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?

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  Episode #2

  Referrals and Hope Are Not a Strategy (with Dr. Mary Ann Woodruff & Rachel Lettieri)

  Jul 1, 202648 minS1

  In this video episode of Thriving 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.

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  Episode #10

  Love Well and Grow Well (with Alison Peak)

  Jun 17, 202636 minS2

  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.

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