The power of Muneer Karcher-Ramos

Muneer Karcher-Ramos grew up with a foot in two worlds.

There was the world of his Mexican-American father, who worked at the paper mill in a small Minnesota town, and the world of his white mother, a saleswoman who spent her days crisscrossing rural roads.

In the overwhelmingly white landscape of central Minnesota, that duality often felt like a burden. 

He was called “spic” and “wetback.” The “Latino shame,” as he now calls it, ran so deep that one day he refused to walk into a grocery store with his father.

That moment became a crucible. The shame stung, but it also clarified something. He decided he would never hide again. 

He began to “throw down,” embracing his full identity and confronting prejudice wherever he saw it. 

When classmates publicly showed racism against Black and Latino students, he called them out.

It was his first act of resistance, the moment he learned that silence costs more than confrontation.

But the next chapter would test him in a different way: not for who he was, but for who he was willing to become.

* * * 

By the time he graduated from high school, Muneer had already defied a few expectations. 

His guidance counselor told him he was “technical-college material.” 

An aunt saw something else: “You’re going to go to college,” she said, planting a seed that would quietly take root.

He arrived at the University of Minnesota ready to prove her right, but instead, he stumbled. 

Most mornings, he decided whether to attend class by touching the dorm-room window. Too icy? He’d crawl back into bed. 

By the end of freshman year, his GPA had sunk to 2.2, and he was on academic probation.

“That was kind of a wake-up call, like, ‘What am I doing?’” he says.

The turnaround was dramatic. He made the Dean’s List almost every semester afterward, picked up tutoring shifts at a public library, and began engaging with the world beyond campus. 

There, he met Somali coworkers whose quiet faith and discipline intrigued him. 

The Islamophobic rhetoric that saturated post-9/11 America didn’t add up. 

“If a billion Muslims are terrorists,” he reasoned, “the world would be a lot worse than it is.”

One coworker’s humility stuck with him. When asked a question he couldn’t answer, the man would simply say, “I don’t know. I’ll come back tomorrow and get you the answer.” 

Over six months of these conversations, Muneer’s curiosity deepened. 

He was invited to a Muslim conference. Someone asked if he wanted to become Muslim.

He said yes.

Minutes later, he stood before thousands of people, reciting the Shahada. 

He was 19 years old. The man who grew up navigating the space between cultures had just stepped into a new world, one that would both ground him and expand his sense of community in ways he couldn’t have imagined.

* * * 

By the fall of that year, Muneer was the vice president of the Muslim Student Association. 

He was an extrovert by nature, comfortable code-switching between his Latino friends, his new Muslim brothers and sisters from every corner of the world, and his fellow political science and sociology majors. 

He was not the typical engineer or pre-med student that dominated the Muslim student circles at the time. 

He was studying social justice, doing community organizing, and working on the Minnesota Dream Act, a state law that allows certain undocumented students to access in-state tuition rates and state financial aid at Minnesota public colleges and universities.

“All the Muslims were like, ‘Who is this guy?’” he remembers with a laugh.

After college, he went to the University of Chicago for his master’s, got married, and returned to Minnesota, taking a job as a researcher at Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, a nonprofit research and evaluation organization based in St. Paul.

He thought he was on the path to becoming a “scholar activist,” an academic who supports social movements from the ivory tower.

Instead, the work pulled him out of the tower and into the heart of the community. 

Muneer became the lead researcher for the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood, a community-based education and family support initiative housed within the Wilder Foundation.

He was so deeply embedded in the work that when the director position opened up, he threw his hat in the ring at the last minute. 

He was 26 years old and had never raised a single dollar in his life. He got the job.

Muneer was about to discover that his background as a researcher had given him a secret weapon. 

He knew where every other program was making its mistakes.

* * *

“One of your main jobs as an evaluator,” Muneer explains, “is helping people articulate how they’re going to make impact.”

At the Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood, he turned that principle into practice. 

His background in research gave him a clear advantage: he could see where most programs stumbled before they even began. 

He started with a problem every educator knew—“summer learning loss,” the academic slide that hits low-income students hardest once school ends.

He launched a summer reading program and, against the advice of others, carved out part of his limited budget for rigorous evaluation. 

The results were immediate: more than 90 percent of students in the program maintained or improved their reading levels. 

That single data point became his proof of concept. Muneer took it on the road, building credibility, and the budget and aligned investments grew from $700,000 to over $7 million.

Next, he went after a deeper barrier to learning: unstable housing. 

“If you’re not in a seat, in school, you’re not going to learn,” Muneer says. 

The program he built helped more than a hundred families secure stable homes. The impact was staggering: chronic absenteeism among their children dropped from 47 percent to just 7 percent.

But he didn’t stop at celebrating local wins. Muneer, alongside a coalition, packaged the data, brought it to the state legislature, and turned that pilot into a permanent statewide initiative, now funded at multi-million-dollar levels every year.

Through it all, he came to understand a larger truth: complex problems require layered solutions. 

“You’re not going to program your way out of the issues,” Muneer says. “Sometimes you have to work on policy. Sometimes you need to do storytelling and narrative change.”

By 2019, his success was impossible to ignore. 

Two calls came in the same week: one from St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, inviting him to build a new Office of Financial Empowerment for St. Paul, and another from the governor’s office, asking him to explore the role of assistant commissioner of education. 

He wasn’t looking to leave, but the world was telling him it was time for a new challenge.

He chose the city. 

It was a blank canvas, and the chance to build something from the ground up. 

Over the next five years, he launched one of the nation’s first publicly funded guaranteed income programs, a college savings account program, helped erase over $100 million in medical debt for St. Paul residents, and championed some of the strongest renter protections in the country.

Muneer was having the time of his life. But his body was keeping score.

* * *

Over five years at the city, Muneer gained 75 pounds. 

He felt great mentally, but one day he looked in the mirror and saw a stranger. 

"I saw someone else's body with my mind and my brain," he says. 

His doctors ran every test; he was perfectly healthy.

The answer came from a book he was listening to in the car. 

It described how the body can put on weight as a form of "padding," a somatic response to protect itself from a hostile environment. "The only advice I have," the author said, "is to get out."

He came home and told his wife, "I'm done with the city." 

Muneer tendered his resignation without another job lined up. His health and his family came first.

That same week, a recruiter called from the McKnight Foundation, one of Minnesota’s largest and most influential private foundations.

Today, at the McKnight Foundation, Muneer oversees a $32 million portfolio and works on some of the most complex systems-change efforts in Minnesota. 

Yet when he talks about what guides him, he doesn’t begin with strategy or policy. He begins with niyyah—intention. Every major decision, from leaving the city to joining McKnight, started with naming what mattered most: health, family, and purpose.

His frame is grounded in Islamic ethics. Muneer returns to rahma (mercy) and sabr (patience) as practical guides for leadership: mercy in how people are met; patience when systems move slowly or push back. 

For Muslims navigating careers, his counsel is action-first and community-facing. 

He urges people to “start somewhere”—there is no perfect time, and the starting point can be small. 

He also presses for finding a “political home,” not as party loyalty but as a place to work on the issues that matter and to build civic muscle alongside others. 

And he insists that professional identity isn’t the endpoint but a means: “Our community needs us,” Muneer says. “We are more than our professions. We are community members.”