Red River Valley woman helps immigrants chase the American dream

In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman’s words “contribute a verse” each day. MPR News sent longtime reporter Dan Gunderson on a mission to capture those stories as part of a new series called “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”

Fowzia Adde knows inspiration can come from the darkest times. Seven years spent in a refugee camp in Kenya as a teenager fuels her drive to help immigrants succeed in the Fargo-Moorhead area.

The Somalia native came to the United States alone in 1997 at age 19, finding her way to Fargo, N.D., as she followed friends from the refugee camp. She pursued training in a nursing field, but an accident that left her with a badly injured leg closed off that career path, so she sought out other ways to help people.

She founded a nonprofit, the Immigrant Development Center, dedicated to helping immigrants succeed in the Red River Valley.

In 2012 the organization started the International Market Plaza, an immigrant business incubator in Fargo that’s now home to 24 small businesses owned by immigrants, including a grocery store, two restaurants and two used car dealers.

“Our mission statement is to build the capacity of new Americans, to give them the resources that will make them prosper in this community,” Adde, 47, said recently as she watched the owners of a grocery store in the market replace a broken freezer. 

The entrepreneurial spirit that created this support system took shape in the refugee camp in Kenya where life for her and her family was a daily struggle to find water and food. Adde says her mother held the family together by baking pastries and bread and selling them in the camp.  

“In the evening, she will have something to feed us,” said Adde.  “She worked so hard. And I follow her footsteps.”

Adde’s found success in Fargo-Moorhead. She made the regional YWCA’s Women of the Year list in 2003. Her family has settled here. Still, she said the work over more than two decades hasn’t been easy. 

She can recall being ignored and patronized by white community leaders who couldn’t see beyond the color of her skin, and by fellow Somali immigrants for “being an open-minded woman, for being involved, for being a woman at the front. I lost a lot of friends. I was thinking I was making them proud," she said.

It didn’t stop her. 

Her resolve was tested again in 2022 when a white supremacist group called Patriot Front vandalized the International Market Plaza in Fargo, spray-painting slogans across murals that were part of the building’s identity. Her children’s faces were part of the vandalized mural. 

“That shook me,” said Adde as her eyes filled with tears.

“But I don’t still give up on the American dream,” she insisted. "I paid my dues, right? I became a citizen, 2003 in this country. I worked so hard, I paid my taxes. What else would you do to be a good American citizen?”

Adde is not backing down. The Immigrant Development Center joined with the North Dakota Human Rights Commission in a federal lawsuit against Patriot Front, alleging among other things, a conspiracy among the members of Patriot Front to “deprive the Plaintiffs of their civil rights” The case is in the discovery stage in the U.S. District Court in North Dakota.

She’s raising money to develop a second International Market in Moorhead that would support more than 30 businesses. She’s learned there are more resources available to immigrants in Minnesota than there are in North Dakota.

And Adde said access to financing is an ongoing challenge for minorities and immigrant-owned businesses.

“Most of the people who have businesses around here, they work full time in a production line, and then they open their business in the evening,” she explained. “If we had enough loans for them, then they will be able to have their business full time.”

Despite the challenges, Adde has no plans to pull back her efforts to help immigrants succeed. “A woman like me with this energy,” she said, “I don’t think I will retire, because I love working. It just gives me joy.”