Thrive Dispatches

Building the Workforce Behind the Workforce (with Jamal Berry)

This week, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Jamal Berry [https://www.educaredc.org/about/staff/], President and CEO of Educare DC [https://www.educaredc.org/], 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 [https://ascend.aspeninstitute.org/profile/jamal-berry/]. 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.”

Building Trust Through Community Partnership (with Dr. Christine Page-Lopez)

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.

Navigating Federal Policy in Extraordinary Times (with Sunny Patel)

In this episode, Dr. Matt Biel speaks with Dr. Sunny Patel [https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/contact/003UH00000a9dF9YAI/sunny-patel], a child psychiatrist [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunnyapatel/] 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 has bravely spoken out [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/05/perinatal-psychiatrist-ssri-pregnancy-misinformation] against misinformation [https://time.com/7322067/tylenol-autism-rfk-jr-science/] and documented the impact of federal cuts [https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/federal-cuts-dismantling-children-s-behavioral-health-systems] on children's behavioral health systems.

Breaking the House of Cards (with Jay Chaudhary)

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."

Love as an Operational Strategy (with Shawn Hardnett)

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.