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To understand Kowsar Mohamed, you must first understand Cedar-Riverside not just as a neighborhood in Minneapolis, but as an idea.
A metropolis within a city, a cluster of high-rises, conceived as a self-contained “new town.”
A place so dense it ranks among Minneapolis’s highest-poverty areas, yet so rich with community that a young Kowsar felt insulated from that reality.
“I always felt like I had someone looking out for me,” she says. “Whether that was to share sugar or milk, or to run errands together to the local store.”
This was her world. She is a daughter of Cedar-Riverside, raised in the city’s public schools, shaped by its challenges, and its unexpected grace.
In this communal ecosystem, sharing was instinct. But she also saw the institutional disenfranchisement, the systemic fault lines that ran beneath her vibrant community.
She was taught to care for her elders, to give more than she received, and to hold an abundant mentality even in the face of scarcity.
But as she grew, she began to understand that care without power could only go so far.
She saw the gun violence, the drive-bys, the pedestrian paths overrun by traffic.
And at eleven years old, she realized that the love of a community, on its own, wasn’t enough to fix a broken system.
She and her friends decided to do something about it.
* * *
While her peers were navigating middle school, Kowsar Mohamed was learning Robert’s Rules of Order in a park after dark.
The community center closed at nine, so the newly formed Cedar Riverside Youth Council, a cohort of determined sixth and seventh graders she co-founded, held their meetings under the stars.
“We had flip phones; some of us didn’t have any phones,” she recalls. “Our parents trusted us that we were going to head back into the apartment soon.”
They weren’t just talking. They were writing proposals to update gym floors. They were petitioning for safer green spaces. They were building relationships for safer streets.
Kowsar was learning to be vocal, but also to listen; to be an advocate, but also a partner. She was learning how to negotiate, not for herself, but for the collective.
But the straight line of a young organizer’s ascent soon hit a wall.
High school arrived, and the disciplined community leader found herself completely adrift.
She attended four different high schools in her freshman year alone, her GPA plummeting to a 1.9.
She was about to face the first of many moments where she had to decide what kind of person she was going to be.
* * *
“It wasn't that I wasn't intellectually sufficient,” she says. “It was that I was in a space of discovering myself.”
She found her footing by embracing a simple principle: the vital importance of good companionship.
A circle of friends anchored her, and the student who was nearly failing ended up graduating with honors.
At the University of Minnesota, she faced another pivotal choice.
The expectation from her mother was clear: medicine.
But chemistry was, as she says, “the death of me.” She sat her mother down for one of the first adult conversations of her life. “I’m sorry,” she told her, “but I think I’m going to have to disappoint you.”
That moment of honest disappointment opened the door to her true passion.
She learned of her family’s long history as pastoralists and discovered the university’s environmental sciences program.
She dove into the grand challenges of climate change, seeing the parallels between the struggles on the African continent and the environmental injustices in her own backyard.
She earned two bachelor’s degrees, then a master’s, and began a career in economic development and public policy. She was now equipped with the professional tools to address the systemic issues she first identified as a child.
She was about to learn that navigating the systems of power required a different kind of resilience altogether.
* * *
For four years, Kowsar served on the University of Minnesota’s Regents Candidate Advisory Council, the body that recommends candidates for the University of Minnesota’s powerful governing board. She had an inside view of the process, learning how power functioned and how leaders were chosen.
Then, in late 2024, the calls started coming. Four seats on the Board of Regents were opening up. People were encouraging her to apply. She had no idea she was stepping into an eight-month political gauntlet.
The process was grueling. She applied, went through months of interviews, and lobbied legislators from both parties. She endured public forums where her merit, experience, and identity were openly questioned.
“They’re telling you to your face, ‘I’m not sure that you’re cut out for this,’” she says, the emotion still raw in her voice. “They saw me as an activist or an organizer. But why does that have to be a negative notion? You want to interrogate systems, but you also want to fix them.”
After the legislature failed to vote, the decision fell to the governor. The process was thrown open again. She had to reapply, resubmit, and re-interview. The loneliness and scrutiny were immense, forcing her to a place of profound self-reckoning.
“It was having to make the tough decision to accept myself,” she says, “before anybody else accepts me.”
* * *
In the end, the governor appointed her.
The young girl who grew up in the shadow of the university, who earned three degrees from it and taught its students, now had a seat at its most powerful table.
The role is a heavy one, a responsibility she feels to the institution and to the communities that shaped her. It’s a weight she never expected to carry.
“I don’t hunt for leadership positions,” she says. “Usually, people ask me to serve and step up.”
This experience has crystallized the powerful advice she now offers to every Muslim professional who feels that same reluctance.
“Sometimes, those who like to work behind the scenes will need to take on the responsibility of being in the limelight to be good stewards,” she says. “If you are asked to step up, step up. There’s a reason why you’re being asked.”
She frames this not just as a professional suggestion, but as a deeper, spiritual responsibility rooted in the very gifts one has been given.
“If Allah has bestowed upon you with ilm, with aql, with ihsan,” she says, “you have a duty as a Muslim and as a community member to step up and serve. It is a part of your deen.”