Fighting Opioid Addiction Among Refugee Youth in St. Paul, MN

For MindSite News and MinnPost, reporter Andy Steiner found that in St. Paul, community collaboration is the ‘secret sauce’ helping the fight against opioid addiction among at-risk refugee Karen and Karenni youth. The story opens as a nonprofit organizer meets a Karen youth who had struggled with opioid addiction:

It’s a warm Wednesday afternoon in September, and teens and their young-adult mentors are filing into The Urban Village, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based nonprofit that supports young people in the city’s Karen and Karenni refugee communities. Everyone is animated, greeting each other excitedly at this first weekly meeting of the new school year.

D*, a fashionably-dressed young man wearing loose, low-slung jeans and a bright shirt, steps into the light-filled space. He greets friends and sizes up the action before Carly Roepke, Urban Village’s director of operations, arrives at his side. She’s excited to see him, but plays it cool. She was worried that something bad had happened to him.

Life in the Twin Cities has opened up since Metro Surge, when many refugee families went into hiding and students moved to online school. The years before that had also been difficult ones for many Karen and Karenni families.

“I hadn’t seen him since before Metro Surge,” Roepke said later, referring to the months-long ICE immigration enforcement operation that took over the state in the winter of 2026. “Somehow he found his way back here.”

But the best news she received: D was clean and intended to stay that way. Read our story about the efforts made by Urban Village and other organizations working together to reduce rates of youth addiction in the community.