Petra Jimenez has lived most of her life in southwest Minnesota and makes her home in Fulda. A graduate of our 2024 Growing Local: Emerging Leaders cohort, Petra plans to run for the local school board next year. Last year, she organized the first Welcoming Week celebration in Fulda to help build belonging. Petra is a proud parent of four children and works for Worthington District 518 Community Education in adult education.
How did Growing Local help you in your leadership journey?
Leadership, before, I think was scary to me. I don’t see myself so much as a leader as much as I see myself as somebody who works in the background. I’m more comfortable doing that. The more you can learn, that takes away the fear, so you kind of know what you’re doing. Going through Growing Local: Emerging Leaders and learning more about different leadership styles, communication, all those things, was really helpful. I learned a lot about different ways of communicating, and I came to work the next day, and I used it right away.
I’ve been on quite a few boards before for places where I’d volunteered or knew somebody, and now I wanted to be more intentional with the boards that I’m going to be on. I really would like to be on the school board and wanted to know how that all works before getting more involved.
What advice would you give a leader who is just getting started?
I think in your leadership journey, if there are points where it’s harder to keep pursuing opportunities or feeling like you’re going in the right direction, take a step back and evaluate the whole picture and what the goal is and if it needs to be adjusted. Sometimes you get focused on the day-to-day things.
Why did you want to bring Welcoming Week to Fulda?
I love Fulda. I live there, and we were welcomed when we first came. I just don’t see too many more families moving in and staying. They move there, but they don’t stay, so having something like Welcoming Week is really helpful to welcome those new families and let them know what our resources are. Because in a small community, people just kind of know through word of mouth.
What are your future goals for your community and your role within it?
I am going back to school to be an EL [English Language] teacher and hopefully someday work in the Worthington school district or in Fulda. When we first moved here, Worthington didn’t really have an EL program, and they would pull the students who they thought knew more Spanish out of classrooms to help with the newcomers. And so, I did that for a while, when I was really young, in like second and third grade. And that was really fun, and ever since then I thought that would be a cool job. Now there’s a lot of assistance, there’s a teacher pathway program, and there’s a lot of support. I think it’s the right time to do something like that.
