Thriving Neighborhoods Lab

This episode closes out the series with a conversation between Kirk and Markos about proximity, trust, and what it means to do this work alongside community rather than from a distance. Markos shares his own experience growing up in Kendall-Whittier, and how that shaped his understanding of what trust requires. Kirk reflects on the choice to live among the community his family served, and the two...

Markos and Kirk discuss the difference between asking communities for input and giving them genuine decision-making power. They dig into why the first approach is so common, what it costs organizations and funders to share real authority, and what community ownership looks like in practice.

Carol Naughton has spent more than thirty years inside some of the most consequential neighborhood transformation efforts in the country, from leading the East Lake Foundation to helping launch Purpose Built Communities in 2009, where she has served as CEO since 2020. In 2025, Forbes recognized her on its 50 Over 50 Impact list. In this episode, Kirk Wester-Rivera sits down with Carol for a practi...

Investment without protection displaces the people it was supposed to help. Kirk Wester-Rivera sits down with Tony Pickett, CEO of Grounded Solutions Network, to work through the central tension that lives underneath all neighborhood revitalization work. Through 35 years of building community land trusts and shared equity housing models, Tony has spent his career making the case that affordability...

Good work done in silos rarely adds up to transformation. Housing organizations build housing. Education groups improve schools. Workforce programs create job pathways. And yet neighborhoods stay stuck. This episode gets into why. Kirk and Markos Wester-Rivera trace the progression from outputs to outcomes to actual transformation, and make the case that reducing toxic stressors for kids and famil...

Logan Herring built REACH Riverside after seeing something that practitioners across the country quietly recognize but rarely name: a neighborhood full of good organizations doing good work can still fail to produce transformation if no one is holding the integrated strategy. In this conversation, Kirk Wester-Rivera and Logan work through what that gap actually looks like on the ground, what the q...

Kirk and Markos discuss one of the core tensions in community development: how to build on what a community already has while being honest about what it still needs. They explore why leading with community strengths matters, why external resources are still necessary in historically disinvested neighborhoods, and how to bring those resources in without creating dependency.

Neighborhoods occupy a unique position in community development, large enough to address systemic challenges, small enough for residents to have real influence over outcomes. In this episode, Kirk and Markos explore why the neighborhood scale is particularly well-suited for creating lasting change, and what that means for how organizations approach their work. It's a foundational conversation for...

What happens to a child's developing brain when their neighborhood is starved of investment? In this episode, Kirk Wester-Rivera sits down with Dr. Doug Jutte to go beyond the social and economic dimensions of place-based poverty and into the biology. Building on Episode 1's introduction of toxic stressors, Doug unpacks the science of how early neighborhood conditions get literally built into chil...

How did concentrated poverty become engineered into specific neighborhoods across America? In this conversation, Kirk sits down with David Edwards, the Policy Advisor for Neighborhoods at the City of Atlanta and Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Urban Research at the Jimmy and Rosalyn School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology to explore Purpose Built Communities' groun...

Before we dive into the world of holistic neighborhood development, meet the father-son team behind the Thriving Neighborhoods Lab podcast. Kirk Wester-Rivera brings 28 years of lived experience transforming a historically disinvested Tulsa neighborhood, from founding a federally-qualified health center to leading the creation of Tulsa's only inclusively grown neighborhood in a decade. Markos West...