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Nenshi rushes back to city hall for the annual Take Our Kids to Work Day. He speaks to a cluster of 14 and 15-year-olds for nearly an hour, first commending their parents for choosing careers in public service and then answering the teens’ questions (“Why did you choose purple as your campaign colour?” “What is the hardest part of being mayor?”) with characteristically long replies. Many of the youngsters can’t take their eyes off of him. Nenshi and his team are acutely aware of his image: fresh, responsive,accessible. Indeed, one oftheir most underrated campaign tactics was to visit many of the city’s high schools. While high school students can’t vote, they can talk to their parents, which is exactly what they did-in droves. And what excited these teens wasn’t necessarily Nenshi’s progressive policies. It’s that he didn’t look or sound like any politicians they knew. The “crazy mix”-as Nenshi has often called it- of his background is unusual. And as origin stories go, it has served him rather well.

He was conceived in Tanzania, born in Toronto in 1972 and raised in Calgary’s close-knit Marlborough neighbourhood. The Nenshis are Ismaili Muslims and, like most families in Calgary’s working-class northeast, they were not wealthy. As a teen, Nenshi pitched in part-time at his father’s laundromat where, he jokes, he first learned to “make change.”

Nenshi credits his faith for teaching him the value of community. His older sister, Shaheen Nenshi Nathoo, agrees. Religion, she says, taught them the value of public service. Nenshi and his sister both volunteered at the Ismaili mosque. “My parents stressed that no matter what we had, there was someone who had less, and that it was our duty to give back in whatever way we could,” Nenshi Nathoo says. “Even at a young age, Naheed took that lesson to heart.”

Nenshi Nathoo remembers her brother as a quiet kid who, at two, taught himself to read so he could help their grandmother find her favourite shows in TV Guide. His reading preferences quickly grew beyond the television listings. “If you were looking for Naheed,” Nenshi Nathoo says, “you would find him under the kitchen table reading comic books.” Nenshi was less shy in his teens. In junior high, he began to cultivate a public persona by joining the debate team, running for student council and taking roles in school plays.

Nenshi studied commerce at the University of Calgary and was elected student-council president. Fellow students included conservative pundit Ezra Levant, Stephen Harper aide Marie Rajic and long-time federal Liberal Party strategist Kevin Bosch. Bosch and Nenshi headed up Team Quebec in a mock First Ministers’ conference for a Canadian federalism class. (Nenshi was premier.) Bosch remembers Nenshi as bright, gregarious and fully engaged in student life. “Naheed would be the first person to sign up for any event,” he said. “Selling doughnuts for the students’ union, or whatever. There was nothing beneath him.” Bosch expected great things from Nenshi, but even he was surprised when he took aim at the mayor’s chair. “I called my parents and told them to vote for him,” Bosch said. “But I honestly didn’t think he’d win.” Nothing would surprise Bosch now. “I’m done underestimating Naheed. The sky’s the limit.”

Instead of following his classmates directly into politics, Nenshi moved to Toronto after graduation and joined McKinsey & Company, an international business-consulting firm. He travelled widely, advising retail companies, telecommunications companies, banks and oil and gas corporations. With McKinsey’s sponsorship, Nenshi completed his master’s degree in public policy at Harvard in 1998.

In 2001, missing Canada in general and Calgary in particular, Nenshi came home. “Part of it was family and friends,” he says. “But part of it, too, was the fact that this city is such a great place.” After starting his own consultancy business, Nenshi landed at Calgary’s Mount Royal College (now a university) in 2004, teaching nonprofit management. “I loved being a teacher,” he says. “I loved working with students.”

Nenshi also loved municipal issues. Just a few weeks after returning to Calgary, he read about city hall’s plans to privatize the city’s electrical utility. “We were on the verge of making a terrible mistake and selling the utility for far less than it was actually worth.” Nenshi crunched the numbers and then wrote up the findings in a short paper he submitted to council at a public hearing. The city didn’t sell the utility as planned, and Nenshi vowed to continue challenging city hall’s decisions. He became a regular sight at city council meetings and began writing a newspaper column on municipal affairs. Nenshi was also a member of imagineCALGARY and CivicCamp, two groups devoted to revitalizing Calgary, and was the principal author of the 2002 report “Building Up: Making Canada’s Cities Magnets for Talent and Engines of Development,” which collected ideas from across Canada on channelling the creativity of urban youth. As well, thousands watched his 2010 TEDx-Calgary talk, “Calgary 3.0,” which explored how the city’s sprawling growth was creating enclaves of visible minorities and how the problem could be addressed.

No surprise, then, that the moment Calgary’s previous mayor, Dave Bronconnier, announced he would not run for re-election, Nenshi’s cellphone started to ring. He was in Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics at the time, waiting in the rain for a Japanese hot dog. Nenshi hung up, immediately called a few close associates and then turned to the friend he was with, Brian Singh, for advice. “He asked me whether he should run,” says Singh, who works as a pollster. As the line inched forward, he and Nenshi went over potential election strategies. They talked about the obvious frontrunner-long-time alderman Ric McIver, who had been itching for the job for years-and whether Nenshi could beat him. “Naheed became extremely focused,” Singh remembers. “He was thinking about everything he had to do.” By the time they had their hot dogs, the two were soaking wet and convinced Nenshi could win.

The logic, however, wasn’t apparent to anyone else. McIver rode his city-hall credentials and his “common-sense conservative” self-branding to the top of the polls. He was followed by veteran newscaster Barb Higgins, who was helped by her name recognition. Nenshi’s support languished in the single digits. Less than a month before election day, on October 18, he was polling at eight percent out of a packed field of 15 contenders. As the date neared, however, Nenshi’s support began to swell.

His purple campaign signs bloomed on front lawns-and as Facebook profile photos. Approximately a week and a half before Calgarians went to the ballot boxes, Nenshi jumped to third place, with McIver and Higgins tied for the lead. A couple of days later, all three candidates were in a dead heat. Then calamity struck. The day before the election, Team Nenshi’s phones crashed. The service providerbased in Vancouver had gone down for scheduled maintenance and its staff was off for the weekend. After six hours of phone silence-an eternity on the campaign battlefield-Nenshi’s team tracked down the number of the company’s vice president, who switched the system back on. “The whole point of a campaign is to call people to get out and vote,” says Chima Nkemdirim, Nenshi’s campaign manger and now his chief of staff. The importance of these calls gets compounded in a tight race where a hundred votes or fewer can make a difference. “It’s a nightmare scenario,” says Nkemdirim. “You want to be able to look in the mirror and say , ‘We did everything we could.'”

Next: How appealing to young voters and engaging citizens through social media helped Nenshi land the mayorship.