Jilla Nadimi, the newly crowned Queen of Snows of the St. Paul Winter Carnival, smiled when she saw two little girls in snowsuits staring at her.
Nadimi, who was in the lobby of the Saint Paul Hotel awaiting her next engagement on Saturday, approached the two little marshmallows. The crown on her head didn’t even wobble as Nadimi, dressed in white, kneeled down to the level of her wee subjects.
The twins, 3-year-old Skylar and Avery McKane of Farmington, smiled when Nadimi said: “You should run for Queen of Snows one day!”
Nadimi, 27, currently lives in the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood of St. Paul, but her road to the crown began more than 4,000 miles away, back when she was just a little older than these preschoolers.
“I was born in Paris, France,” Nadimi says. “My family moved to Minnesota when I was five. I was raised by a single mother and she raised me to be a strong woman who knew the importance of education. As an immigrant, you get to build your own community and sometimes that can be very difficult, but I found a way to get very involved in the city I grew up in, which is Mounds View. I was a Girl Scout there and I fell in love with festivals and carnivals because of my Girl Scout Gold Award.”
The Girl Scout Gold Award is the highest and most prestigious award in the organization.
Nadimi very recently drew upon another experience in scouting: “Selling a lot of Girl Scout cookies gave me the skills to sell a lot of buttons during my candidacy,” she says. In fact, Nadimi — who is sponsored by Party Time Liquor — was the top seller of Winter Carnival buttons among the 14 candidates for the 2018 Queen of Snows, selling $1,544 worth of buttons for the St. Paul Festival & Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit which hosts the Carnival (you might have spotted her selling the buttons at Lunds & Byerlys in Highland Park).
“Selling buttons was a great way to meet people and spread the Legend and hear about what people love about winter, what they’re excited for this year, and the Ice Palace,” says Nadimi. “It’s a big year, and we want to have attention in St. Paul — especially since the world is looking at the Twin Cities with the Super Bowl.”
Her experience as a Girl Scout helped train her for this moment, she says: It was back in high school when she and the the other members of Troop 50165 received their Gold Award for their work with a different festival: “We helped plan the 50th anniversary of Mounds View Festival in the Park,” Nadimi says of that 2008 honor.
After graduating from Irondale High School in New Brighton in 2009, Nadimi studied French and global studies at the University of Minnesota. She was able to return to her roots — Paris — thanks to the U.S. State Department’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program. “It funded my ability to study abroad,” says Nadimi, who graduated in 2012. Nadimi credits the Girl Scouts with helping her get to college at all: “There was a time in high school where I thought maybe my mom couldn’t afford for me to go to college,” says Nadimi, who also has a sister. “The Girl Scouts helped me to build my resume in a way that allowed me to get a lot of scholarships.”
When she came back from Paris, though …
“I had spent my whole life thinking about this one country,” says Nadimi, “but I hadn’t really been thinking about my home. I had been involved in the community in Mounds View, but I really wanted to work and see what kind of people live in our state.”
This is how Nadimi came to be an Urban Scholar, working at Minneapolis City Hall: “The program is about increasing diversity in local government,” Nadimi says. “As a woman, as an immigrant, as a second language learner of English, I qualified for that program. And then I started working for the Elections department … that’s when I fell in love with community engagement again.”
In 2015, she was on the road again: “I had an opportunity to work in Ecuador in the Galápagos Islands.” Nadimi explains: “I wanted to learn Spanish, so I took the chance, I left my position at the City and worked there for 13 months with the National Park Directorate, in donor relations. It was a life-changing opportunity.”
It changed her life because she helped her new community during a crisis: “There was an earthquake when I was in Ecuador and it damaged a city that I loved, Guayaquil, and some people at the park lost family members,” Nadimi says. Being the Girl Scout that she is, Nadimi jumped into action, helping to organize a nutrition-related program for survivors through crowdfunding. In the process, Nadimi discovered: “I really wanted to be involved in humanitarian relief work, I wanted to make this my life’s work,” she says. “So I started volunteering with the American Refugee Committee when I came back.”
The American Refugee Committee, based in Northeast Minneapolis, is a nonprofit focused on helping out in refugee camps as well as providing emergency relief abroad. “I feel so fortunate to do work locally but also think about global issues,” says Nadimi, who now works for the ARC as a global quality and results officer.
For the next year, her local volunteer work will come with a sparkly crown and lots of white gowns.
“I knew I wanted to get involved with Carnival back in Mounds View, it’s been almost 12 years that I’ve wanted to do this,” Nadimi says. “Finally, I’ve had the time to dedicate to this role — it is a very big commitment and I take very seriously, including in my candidacy, I really wanted to be intentional about why I wanted to run. I wanted to show, particularly young women, that even if you are an immigrant, you can still represent the city that you live in.”
She’s looking forward to it.
“My work can be pretty heavy, and this is a lighthearted way to give back,” she says.
In her spare time — there’s not much of it now, of course — Nadimi likes to spend time with her boyfriend, her cat and her garden. She’s also been known to ride her bicycle all the way to Duluth, and she enjoys singing in her church choir. For now, though, she’s focused on Carnival and embracing the motto of King Boreas: “Building strong communities one ice block at a time.”
When the crown was placed on her head on Friday night, Nadimi said she was shocked.
“I get to represent my city,” she says, her voice full of wonder. “It’s a dream.”
Copyright 2018 Pioneer Press.