Serving as a voice for diverse populations in Saint Cloud
Hudda Ibrahim D’25, who earned her Ed.D. in Leadership at Saint Mary’s in June, knows that education opens doors — and helps win elections and ultimately helps her serve her constituents to the best of her ability.
When Ibrahim felt anxiety, running as the first Muslim immigrant woman to serve on the Saint Cloud, Minn., City Council, she was encouraged by these words: “I will be voting for you because of your education.”
“That gave me the confidence to go and knock on more doors,” she said. “I began to realize they don’t care about my skin color, certainly not my hijab, nor my accent. They care that I am someone who has the education and the skills to become a leader in the city. This changed my preconception of ‘What if my identity, the way I look, or the way I dress impacts the outcome of my election?’ My positive experience in interacting and engaging with the voters really gave me that confidence to continue. I knew I was a great candidate and a strong one if I moved forward.”
On a unanimous vote in December 2024, city councilors appointed Hudda Ibrahim to fill a Ward 3 vacancy on the seven-member panel.
She had run for city council earlier and lost, but with a new vacancy came a new opportunity for her to expand her lifelong work of advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Her top priorities as a city council member are centered around addressing housing shortages, supporting small businesses, and ensuring safe neighborhoods. She will ensure all voters have an equal voice in Saint Cloud, where 30.3 percent of the population identify as people of color.
She also currently works with OneCommunity Alliance, again helping address disparities and inequalities, particularly focusing on Saint Cloud’s housing shortages. Previously she worked at St. Cloud Technical & Community College, where she taught diversity and social justice.
And, she started Diverse Voices Press to “give attention to the unheard voices of refugees, immigrants, and other underrepresented people, affirming their limitless capacity for resilience and success.”
In total, she’s authored six children’s books with titles like “What Color is My Hijab?”; “Basra Wants to Be a Paramedic”; and “Mohamed Goes to the Moon” — all to show young Muslim children, and all children, that they can be anything they want to be when they grow up.
She believes she inherited leadership skills and advocacy genes from her family, which fled Kenya during the civil war in Somalia. Her mother was also an educator and her father was first a police officer, working his way all the way up to a colonel in the Somali army before they came to Minnesota.
“I came from a family of educators and policymakers. My dad was always very active in his community … and he always taught us to be kind to others and respect our neighbors. And I think those are the things that stayed with me. And I remember when I first thought of running for local office, I would remember my dad telling me, ‘Hudda, believe in yourself. Trust yourself. You are capable of doing these things.’ ”
Ibrahim said she always knew she’d wanted to pursue an education degree, particularly in leadership. Having attended private Catholic schools previously, she appreciated Saint Mary’s heritage.
“It has been a game changer for me, not just for the city council, but also in the consulting firm that I was running,” she said. “It gave me the skills and the attributes that I wanted. As a nonprofit organization director, it helped me sharpen my leadership and policy skills. Now I can make informed and data-driven decisions.
“The program has also strengthened my ability to collaborate and resolve conflicts … and communicate effectively, which is so important when engaging with diverse stakeholders and beyond that, I would also say it’s given me the tools to advocate for education and equity.”
Ibrahim believes so strongly in the program that she is now recruiting her husband to enroll. “Saint Mary’s has world-class professors, professors who do care about the work that they’re doing, and the colleagues, the people that I met in this program were amazing,” she added. “And the valuable connections that you build when you’re a part of this program is something that no money can buy, seriously.”
