Abdi Warsame Narrator Ahmed Ismail Yusuf Interviewer June 12, 2014 Minneapolis, Minnesota Abdi Warsame -AW Ahmed Ismail Yusuf -AY AY: This is Ahmed Ismail Yusuf recording for the Minnesota Historical Society Somali Oral History Project. I am here with Abdi Warsame, who is the highest Somali official elected in Minneapolis—Minnesota, actually, in that matter. Abdi, welcome to the interview, and thanks for agreeing to it. AW: Oh, thank you, Yusuf. I appreciate the opportunity. AY: So I normally actually start it from the basis of where one was born and when, sort of those things. But in your case, let us just exactly talk about when you came to Minneapolis first of all. AW: Well, I came to Minneapolis in the year 2006, which is about eight years ago now. AY: And the reason why I am just exactly asking that question is just that it seems that, to me actually, with the speed of light you traveled through the ranks and became the first Somali official elected in this state. Nationwide, you are the second Somali elected. So did you have that ambition when you actually came here, or how did it start? AW: Well, to go back a little bit, I didn’t come directly from Somalia. I came from London, England. I was born in Somalia, and I was raised in the UK, across the pond. I grew up in a place called Leytonstone in East London. I was educated in the UK. I went to King’s College, University of London. I graduated from Middlesex University, and I also got a master’s degree from Greenwich University with an international business degree. I moved to the United States in 2006. I was brought here by my wife and my daughter, and when I first came, my ambition was to settle in, to become a citizen, and to work hard and find a place for myself and for my family. AY: So you had no political ambition to say, not the least. AW: No. I mean, at that time I didn’t even know where I was, and I was getting adjusted to the environment and to the weather and to a new city, a new life, a new baby. So it was an exciting time, but for me there was no grand plan. Things basically fell into place with time. 1 AY: But in the process of actually, even, going to school in London, sort of those things, how were you politically involved? How informed were you when it comes to political… AW: You know, to be a Somali and to be a Somali of my generation and the generation of the civil war, and to live in the original diaspora city of London where you had Somalis from all across the country, the former republic—politics was in your blood. Politics was part of your life. My family have political background back in Somalia. The civil war informed us, our generation—the longing for home, the reason why. As a child I asked many times, “Why are my people so poor? Why are they destitute? Why are they refugees everywhere? Why are they suffering? Why is there so much hardship?” So those were political questions that were always on my mind. And when I was younger, in my college days, I was one of the founders of the Somali Student Association in the UK. We organized ourselves. We always had discussions and discourse about what it was to be a Somali in the diaspora, and how we could be successful in the countries that we lived in, especially the UK, and also how we could contribute to the people back home. AY: So you came to Minnesota, and actually the first title you had was the executive director of Riverside Plaza Tenant Association. Which is not exactly much, but in that where the Somalis are concentrated, what did you see? How did that ambition fall within there? AW: Before the tenants’ association position, I worked for Wells Fargo for a while. I applied what I learned from school. Fortunately the position came up for the tenants’ association, the Riverside Plaza Tenants’ Association [RPTA], to be the executive director of RPTA. And to be the executive director of RPTA was an important milestone for myself. AY: In what way? AW: Because what it did was it connected me to my future constituents. It allowed me to understand some of the issues that affected the large and growing Somali-American community in Minneapolis in a way that I would not have had. I would not have had the insight that I had from working at RPTA by working at any other job, because when you do a nine-to-five job and you have a family, it takes a toll. You don’t have enough time to gauge people. But when your job is to represent the tenants of the association—and we represented four thousand tenants. We employed twenty people. We had a good, sizeable budget. So it wasn’t a bad job in any stretch of the imagination. And we ran all the community spaces within the plaza, so we were running a small city, as to speak. And also I was the chair of the Cedar-Riverside NRP, Neighborhood Revitalization Program. That was a volunteer position, but that kind of also gave me insight into the issues of the neighborhood, where you had the neighborhood where eighty percent or ninety percent of the people were renters, and yet the Neighborhood Revitalization Program was geared towards homeowners. So there was preferential treatment for homeowners, and there wasn’t enough support for the tenants or renters who lived in the plaza, who happened to be East Africans—Somali majority with Oromo population. So those kind of things kind of gave us an insight into some of the equity issues that would come up in my election. So being there, meeting the elders, meeting the mothers and our brothers and sisters on a day-to-day basis, solving some of their problems that they had with the landlord, and the problems that they had with security, 2 and issues that they had with the police, and just basically livability issues, was a great insight and it was a great preparation for my future agenda. AY: So at the beginning, were you just exactly trying to advocate from the grassroots point of view and you did not have—I mean, how did you all of a sudden get this… AW: Well, there was an election. I mean, if the question is… Even when I was at RPTA, I did not really understand or have an appreciation for political office. Remember, this is my first time there. The first election that I ever participated in was 2008—Barack Obama’s rise. That was something that was amazing, transformational for myself, because Barack Obama happens to have East African heritage, and then the fact that he was such an outsider. So I took part in just following that election, and understanding that election, and studying the importance of the message that he had—the change and the hope, and galvanizing people and encouraging people, and getting to the grassroots. Empowering the small man—I think that was a very important lesson that we learned from 2008. In 2011, there was an election for state Senate. A man by the name of Mohamud Noor was running, and I participated in that. I didn’t know him at that time, and I met him, and he said he was running for state Senate. And I was like, “State Senate?” It was a primary. And, “What’s a primary?” And then we had the task, me and a core group that would later on take part in my election, we had the task of organizing two precincts. One precinct was the Cedar-Riverside precinct, which is the power base of the Somali-American vote. The other precinct was the Seward precinct, which was the neighborhood that I live in now. And we organized it. That was my job. I took that upon myself. It was voluntary. I wasn’t doing it just for him. I was doing it because I wanted to learn, and I wanted to see how far we could stretch. AY: At that moment are you questioning, not the process, but are you questioning the viability of even the… AW: Our numbers. How many East Africans are there and the kind of impact they can have. And he lost by two hundred votes. And what that actually told me was—there are buildings within an area called the Ventura Village area. I think they are called the Hiawatha buildings. Three of them, they kind of look like each other. Another building called the Pentagon behind it. Now, that area is very close to Cedar-Riverside. You can walk to that area from Cedar-Riverside. It’s like two blocks, I think. Almost three blocks. Yet those people could not vote in that election because they were in a different district, they were in a different area. Then I looked at the map of the city itself, and I realized that what we had was a large concentration of East Africans in a very small area, but they were divided into four different wards. And that became something that I kept thinking about on my own. AY: So did you look into it just exactly when Mohamud lost, or just exactly in the process of just organizing it. AW: No.