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.