Geographies of Resilience (with Efren Aguilar)

<p>Efren Aguilar is a researcher and community engagement specialist at the University of California, Los</p><p>Angeles, working at the intersection of early childhood measurement, spatial epidemiology, and systems</p><p>transformation. Over a career spanning more than three decades, he has worked in domestic violence</p><p>prevention, refugee support, homelessness, public health, and early childhood systems, treating each</p><p>role as a study of a different stage of human development.</p><p>In this episode of Thrive Dispatches, Aguilar joins Dr. Matt Biel to discuss the 15 years he has spent</p><p>building geographies of resilience, a way of mapping not only where communities are struggling but</p><p>where they are doing well against the odds. The work started with an observation he could not yet</p><p>explain. The same neighborhoods kept surfacing across unrelated data sets and methodologies, and</p><p>funders were reading those concentrations as need. Concentrated hardship, he argued, is only half the</p><p>measure. It says nothing about what people on the ground have already solved.</p>