Love as a Guide for Engagement With Marginalized Transitional Age Youth

Featuring Dr. Byron Young

Dr. Byron Young is a psychiatrist, a lover of the arts, and a proud Black man; the work he does sits squarely at the intersections of mental health, education, creativity, and social and racial justice. He has learned — in clinic, in community, in years of watching young people navigate systems that were never designed with them in mind — that engagement is not a technique. It is a relationship. And relationships, real ones, require something most training programs never ask of us: the willingness to see another person as fully human, and to examine honestly the ways our own conditioning makes that harder than it should be. This Stress, Trauma, and Resilience (STAR) Seminar is about transitional age youth — young people between the ages of 16 and 25 navigating child welfare, mental health systems, and schools in a world that has already formed opinions about them before they walk through the door — and specifically about Black and brown youth, who are overrepresented in every one of these systems.

The seminar will be grounded in what Dr. Young calls the humanizing love tradition: a lineage running through Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Christopher Emdin, and many other thinkers rooted in social good — centered on a love ethos that is not sentiment but discipline, not charity but solidarity, and above all, a daily, active protection from the dehumanization that systems can quietly inflict. This presentation will look honestly at what gets in the way — systemic barriers, yes, but also our own biases, our burnout, the savior orientation that masquerades as care — and at what actually works: art, creativity, hip-hop, critical dialogue, and the radical act of seeing a young person wholly. Attendees will leave with practical tools, but more than that, Dr. Young hopes participants leave having asked themselves some harder questions — because that is where this work actually begins.

Learning Objectives:

1. Describe the developmental and sociopolitical context of transitional age youth, with particular attention to how systemic racism, intersecting identities, and experiences of institutional harm shape engagement — and disengagement — among Black and brown youth across educational, Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS), and mental health settings.
2. Apply a culturally humble, self-reflective practice orientation that includes honest examination of one's own biases, emotional wellness, and positional power — recognizing that the provider's internal world is not separate from the quality of engagement, but central to it — while centering youth of color and their communities as experts and assets, rather than recipients of rescue.
3. Identify and use creative, arts-based, and culturally resonant approaches — including hip-hop culture, critical storytelling, and dialogue-driven methods — to build authentic rapport, spark critical consciousness, and navigate barriers to engagement with transitional age youth (TAY) across service settings.
4. Demonstrate awareness of cross-cultural relational dynamics, particularly in contexts where providers hold different racial, class, or cultural identities than the youth they serve, and articulate strategies for bridging those differences with honesty, humility, and care.