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.

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 Thriving 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 with Dr. Sunny Patel, a child 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 has bravely spoken out against misinformation and documented the impact 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.