Thrive Dispatches: First, let’s talk about Thrive Center. Tell me the story about it. Why create it?

Dr. Matthew Biel: We're in a moment of sustained crisis — and also opportunity — for addressing the emotional and mental health needs of children and families, and of individuals with developmental disabilities across the lifespan. There is a recognition that has now entered mainstream consciousness “that there is no health without mental health.” We are finally recognizing on a society-wide level that mental health challenges and other disabilities are part of being a human being — that these conditions are incredibly common, that they should not be a cause for shame or stigma, and that thriving as a person often involves grappling with these challenges.

At the same time, I think that some of the ways in which the mental health crisis has been formulated have been too simple. They’ve been too focused on what's wrong with our kids, rather than focusing on what is it about the way that we live in the 21st century that, for too many people, is often stressful and alienating.

So much feels in flux right now: Education is changing. Social interactions are changing. Our economic situation and the future of work is changing. The climate is changing. Our sense of what kind of society and culture we want to build and inhabit — all of these things are changing so quickly. So at the Thrive Center, we are trying to use a broad framework to better understand these challenges so as to help children, families, and communities to thrive.

This is an ambitious undertaking, which I imagine requires a huge system of support. Can you walk me through who makes up Thrive Center's community

of practice? 

Thrive Center is in the wonderful position of building upon a fantastic center that already has existed for a long time at Georgetown University. The Center for Child and Human Development (GUCCHD) is a long-standing organization that has worked on a range of issues, including early childhood, disability, mental health and health equity. It has a fantastic faculty and staff of over 70 individuals who have extensive expertise in these domains. 

To form Thrive, the Center for Child and Human Development is merging with faculty staff and programs from the Department of Psychiatry at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. This merger represents an opportunity to build on the outstanding legacy and foundation from the CCHD and to strengthen our D.C.-based portfolio of community-based research and programs with the addition of personnel and faculty from Psychiatry. With our new Center, we will bridge local, national, and international work; we will bridge clinical care with children, family-strengthening interventions in the community, and community-wide strategies to improve the health and wellbeing of children and of individuals with developmental disabilities across the lifespan. We see an opportunity to spotlight and scale emergent strategies in communities across the D.C. area and across the country that are enhancing the capacities of families and communities to reach their goals.

Who do you imagine will be served by Thrive Center? Is there a specific, future child or individual that you can imagine or describe that you hope to serve? 

We hope that our programs and projects reach a wide range of children and families. Our teams have particular areas of expertise in early childhood, disability, child and family mental health, and in forming deep collaborative partnerships with communities with the goal of every project being led not by us, but by the communities with whom we partner. 

We are particularly dedicated to partnering with communities that have been historically underserved, and divested. We work with those communities to understand: What are their priorities? What are emergent strategies within those communities that are showing promise for addressing key issues related to children’s mental health, family mental health, and full participation of individuals with disabilities in every aspect of community life?

And then we ask: How can we leverage the resources and the expertise of a university-based center to strengthen efforts that are already underway?

How can people get involved with Thrive Center? 

Thrive Center will be built on partnerships. We have a very strong commitment to collaboration. We are interested in joining with researchers and clinicians who are developing innovative interventions and who are looking for ways to implement and evaluate their ideas, outside of the lab and in the real world. 

We partner with organizations like health clinics, schools, and early childhood centers that have identified a priority related to child and family well-being.

We partner with parents and caregivers. We have parent leaders on every single project that we're involved with because we think that the expertise gained by direct, lived experience is critical to making a project successful.

We partner with educators who are trying to figure out how to apply the science around child development, brain development, and relationships to make their classrooms the healthiest, most enjoyable and successful learning environments possible. We also look to positively impact educators' own health and well-being. When educators are overwhelmed or burned out, kids are negatively impacted.

And finally, we partner with communities. We want to work with them to create holistic, systematic strategies across the lives of families. What is the data telling us and what do we need to work on? What are your community's strengths and assets? What are the ways that we can leverage knowledge, technology and cooperation to advance the specific goals your community has?”

One of the things that we hear fairly often is that it can take 17 years for research-based evidence to reach actual clinical practice. How do you think that Thrive Center will help address this issue? 

I think this is a critical goal for Thrive Center. We want our work in the area of child and family well-being, mental health, and disability to be impactful. And when there is this — as you've identified — an enormous gap between some really brilliant idea that has been developed in a lab or in a clinic or in a school, and there's emerging evidence emerging that it could really making a difference, we are often confronted with a massive delay that happens between getting it out into the world. 

That happens for lots of reasons. It has to do with resources. It has to do with the way that information is shared. But we don't think that it has to be that way. And so one of the things that we want to do is to use implementation science, which is the science of taking practices that work into the real world, adapting them with input from participants, and then scaling them in a way that enhances impact.

So oftentimes, we're looking at an intervention that was developed in a particular community or for a particular population. We will try to figure out, “How does that apply to this different community, this different population, this different cultural, ethnic, linguistic, or racial group, or this distinct geographic area? What elements of the intervention should stay the same? And, crucially, What do we have to adapt based on input from families and practitioners on a local level, to create improved versions that make it work there?” 

We want to accelerate that adaptation process — that scaling process — so that we get better interventions to families quicker. Networking is a crucial part of that. Relationships are a crucial part of that. Careful application of the tools of implementation science is crucial. I also think the emphasis on partnership, sharing, and generosity — as opposed to ownership of new and exciting ideas — is really important as well.

This is where innovation comes in, right?

That leads me to another aspect of Thrive Center's work: we are launching an Innovation Hub at Thrive Center that will work in partnership with innovators outside of Georgetown who are coming up with new ideas for solving familiar and difficult problems. These may be innovators in the private sector or in startup companies; they may be innovators who are working in the nonprofit sector. In many cases, digital health tools and other forms of technology will be central features of these innovations. We will invite these innovative organizations to join Thrive in structured partnerships called “fellowships” in which we will leverage the expertise of our researchers, clinicians, advocates, and experts with lived experience to help accelerate the path toward the scaling of those innovations. We will identify ideas or programs that we think are really exciting and promising — particularly ideas that are promising for closing disparities in access to high-quality intervention based on race, language, geography, or economic status — and we will help them to solve some of the barriers that are getting in the way of them going from idea to scale.