Geographies of Resilience (with Efren Aguilar)

Efren Aguilar is a researcher and community engagement specialist at the University of California, LosAngeles, working at the intersection of early childhood measurement, spatial epidemiology, and systemstransformation. Over a career spanning more than three decades, he has worked in domestic violenceprevention, refugee support, homelessness, public health, and early childhood systems, treating eachrole 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 spentbuilding geographies of resilience, a way of mapping not only where communities are struggling butwhere they are doing well against the odds. The work started with an observation he could not yetexplain. The same neighborhoods kept surfacing across unrelated data sets and methodologies, andfunders were reading those concentrations as need. Concentrated hardship, he argued, is only half themeasure. It says nothing about what people on the ground have already solved.