Digital Wellbeing and Reimagining Black Youth Mental Health

The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) partnered with the Brooklyn Bridge Alliance for Youth (BBAY) to establish a new process for working with communities.

Reimagine Black Youth Mental Health Initiative Video

Mental wellbeing in Black youth

Mental wellbeing is about having fulfilling relationships, utilizing strengths, contributing to community and being resilient, which is the ability to bounce back after setbacks. Mental wellbeing is a core ingredient for success in school, work, health, and community life. Many components are encompassed in mental wellbeing, including ten from the Minnesota Student Survey (MSS) conducted every three years. For more information on the MSS, visit the Minnesota Department of Education website.

• Continuous engagement: An extended mobilizing phase that offers youth and families multiple opportunities to engage, build relationships, and explore this complex topic in a safe environment, is essential to get to the deep level of reflection needed.
• Safety: Youth space focused a lot on building safety to have meaningful discussions about mental health. This critically informed a safe, engaging, and transformational youth summit.
• Complexity: Mental health is a complex topic involving trauma, racial identity, history, and family history. Discussions must take place with care, patience, and humility.
• Representation matters: There must be broad representation in participants and leadership from across the diaspora because the Black experience is diverse.
• Mobilizing youth leadership: Active engagement of youth to inform and shape the community process is foundational.
• Sharing power is a practice: Implementing power sharing in day-to-day operations can be challenging despite sharing this core value. It requires ongoing efforts to build trust, navigate relationships and decision making, outline roles and set boundaries between leadership bodies.  

Advisory Council

The Advisory Council was cultivated through individual stakeholder meetings, an initial public meeting with potential local system partners, and development of a draft charter; the council launches formally in January 2023. The council is comprised of individuals at various levels of leadership from the Hennepin County Public Health Department, City of Brooklyn Park, City of Brooklyn Center, Osseo Area schools, Brooklyn Center Community Schools, Anoka-Hennepin Schools, Robbinsdale Schools, North Hennepin Community College and Hennepin Technical College, and a range of community organizations including African Career Education & Resources, and InTentions.

The Council also includes other key decisionmakers in the Black community such as parents, pastors, and educators. They have spent most of the first year of this project building deep and wide relationships within the community to develop trust and respect in the community. Building community trust was an ESSENTIAL component of this project with the Black communities in Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center. In the second year they were instrumental in the planning and facilitation of research visits as well as providing consultation in the design of the demonstration project.

Black youth affinity space

Although Black youth are actively participating in leadership spaces throughout this project, it became quickly apparent that it was essential and valuable for Black youth to have their own space. The Black Youth Space was launched in Spring 2022 to build community, explore identity and culture, and better understand mental health and wellbeing. The group meets every two weeks to build trust, relationships and shared experience with other Black people, and explore wellness. This youth space is critical for mobilizing and engaging Black youth who are taking on leadership roles in this initiative. One of the significant findings in this project was the need for this Black youth affinity space for young people to feel safe and heard.

State Resource Team

The State Resource Teams provides the infrastructure to implement policies and practices that improve outcomes for Black youth mental health. MDH has established partnerships across the state enterprise that can help leverage additional resources, contacts, and research to support effective policy implementation, amplify and promote effective policies from the demonstration project, and support sustainability by incorporating aspects of the process into existing programs and providing vehicles for systematically scaling the policy implementation in other community settings.

Health in all policies approach  

Mental Health: a state of wellbeing in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community. – World Health Organization   

The health in all policies approach leverages the relationships between positive mental health and the many social factors that impact mental health, from education, parks, public recreation, to policing and more. These policy areas impact our health and mental health whether we are conscious of them or not. Ensuring policies enhance our mental wellbeing and elevate human dignity, respect, and growth; Black youth will have opportunities to better contribute to society and develop in a positive and healthy way. Policies that invest in the economic, social, and political environments will contribute to overall increased wellbeing for all.

Through this lens, the Advisory Council, in partnership with Black youth in the community, will identify and implement specific policies at the local level that are expected to have the greatest impact on BYMH.  Under the leadership of the Advisory Council, the community will develop a process to engage Black Youth in identifying a range of policies that play a role in improving BYMH.  

Mental wellbeing and racial justice

Mental wellbeing requires a sense of purpose and self-determination. To truly experience mental wellbeing, Black youth need to feel and have the power to shape their world and change their lives and conditions for the better. For many, historical trauma is a reality that disrupts a sense of purpose and power and continues to be part of lived experience and reality.

Systematic racism and generational structural inequities (social, economic, political, and environmental) result in poor health outcomes. These inequities have a greater influence on health outcomes than individual choices or one’s ability to access health care, and not all communities are impacted the same way. All people living in Minnesota when health disparities are reduced and racial equity is advanced.