Efren Aguilar is a researcher and community engagement specialist at the University of California, Los

Angeles, working at the intersection of early childhood measurement, spatial epidemiology, and systems

transformation. Over a career spanning more than three decades, he has worked in domestic violence

prevention, refugee support, homelessness, public health, and early childhood systems, treating each

role 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 spent

building geographies of resilience, a way of mapping not only where communities are struggling but

where they are doing well against the odds. The work started with an observation he could not yet

explain. The same neighborhoods kept surfacing across unrelated data sets and methodologies, and

funders were reading those concentrations as need. Concentrated hardship, he argued, is only half the

measure. It says nothing about what people on the ground have already solved.