Hibaaq Osman has a glow that changes the energy in a room, or in her case, the energy of the restaurant her family owns in Karmel mall, the oldest Somali mall in Minneapolis.
The cafe is right near the mosque on the top floor of the building, past rows of entrepreneurs selling wares in individual stalls, sipping hot drinks in small cups and chatting in Somali. Osman retains her glow, even in anger. And after a press conference held outside the mosque, she is upset.
“I feel like we as a community need to wake up,” she said. “We need to wake up and say, ‘You know what? Enough is enough.’ We are citizens, we are taxpayers, we own businesses, we need people to understand that we also are part of this country just the way anybody else is.”
Opponents of the CVE program point out that these 40 individuals make up less than 0.3% of Minnesota’s Somali population.
Already, the CVE pilot program has been re-branded with a new name, Building Community Resilience. Luger’s office says it captures the essence of his vision: to keep teens from Minnesota from traveling to the Middle East and blowing themselves up.
Luger says it will do so by providing $216,000 in federal funds – in addition to other local and private support – which will be disbursed to community groups through a grant-making organization. The social services supported by the funding serve as crime prevention, he contends.
But a statement issued from a coalition protesting the program asserted: “The Minnesota Muslim community is united over its growing concerns of the CVE pilot program, which so far has only alienated the very communities it was seeking to influence. While attempting to derail the communities’ own initiative to enhance its ability to build community resilience.”