Innovative youth programming at Hennepin County: Part 3
01-08-2026
The youth we can't lose
Mental Health Center therapist Kim Dillon had a youth client who’d just been released from the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center (JDC). He’d been court-ordered to house arrest. No internet, no phone, no friends.
How do you help a young person – actively involved in the juvenile justice system – make the right choice to stay safe at home, instead of running the streets with his friends?
For this youth, it was a book.
Dillon and her colleague Margaret Kelly complete Diagnostic Assessments for all youth at the JDC. These assessments evaluate youth’s mental, behavioral, and chemical health needs, and are an important first step in the treatment process. While the assessments are required, the Mental Health Center team also offers the option for youth to continue therapy voluntarily, both while they’re in custody and afterwards. Within Behavioral Health, therapists partner with case managers to bring youth to appointments. Youth at the JDC commonly have lengthy histories of system involvement, and trauma that began in early childhood compounds today. Many have recently witnessed violence and sometimes the deaths of their peers.
That’s a lot to unpack, and it doesn’t happen quickly. But it can start with the assessment, and the relationship the therapist starts to build with the youth they serve.
Kelly asks young people: What do you like? What are you good at? Then, she writes those things into the assessment so they can build on them. That’s the beginning of a treatment plan.
“[Youth] get so surprised when we come in and listen,” said Dillon. She knew her client on house arrest was a reader, a writer. He’d even talked about being a librarian someday.
She asked him what kind of books he liked. Teaming up with Kelly, they gave him a copy of Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia.
“Any time you feel like going out with your boys,” Dillon told him, “Read this instead.”
A strengths-based path forward
Dillon and Kelly’s work starts from identifying youth’s strengths, but they stress that approach doesn’t mean skirting consequences or ignoring harm caused. Instead, their work is a critical intervention for helping youth take a different path forward.
“I will tell them the truth: You can allow the system to hack into you, or you can make changes,” said Dillon.
That could mean working on coping skills for anger, or addressing safety issues. It could mean helping a 13-year-old who influences older youth see his potential as a leader – and learning to use that positively instead.
Amid bad choices and sometimes tragic outcomes, Dillon and Kelly name the goodness they see in the youth they serve. Through their work as mental health professionals, they see kids who care, who have empathy.
“We can’t lose that,” said Kelly.
More about the Mental Health Center
The Hennepin County Mental Health Center primarily serves residents without private insurance or who may be underinsured. The clinic is located on East Lake Street in Minneapolis.
The center’s child and family team delivers specialized therapies, evidence-based treatment, assessments, support and educational groups, and mental health medication management.
A longstanding Hennepin County service, the Mental Health Center moved to Behavioral Health in 2024 for increased access and alignment across the county’s mental health services.