Cheryl Youakim

Cheryl Youakim (born May 29, 1969) is an American politician and educator serving in the Minnesota House of Representatives since 2015. A member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), she represents District 46B in the western Twin Cities suburbs, which includes Hopkins and parts of St. Louis Park and Edina in Hennepin County.

Youakim served on the Hopkins City Council from 2005 to 2013. In the House she has chaired the Education Policy Committee, the Property Tax Division of the Taxes Committee, and the Education Finance Committee, which she has co-chaired since 2025.

Early life, education and career Youakim was born on May 29, 1969. She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Arts in journalism and from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota with a Master of Public Administration.

Youakim moved to Hopkins in 1997. In 2004 she co-founded Start Learning Early, a nonprofit that advocated for early childhood education in the western suburbs, and she was a member of the Hopkins Legislative Action Coalition, a parent group that lobbied for school funding. She served on the Hopkins Human Rights Commission and on the Hopkins City Council from 2005 to 2013, where she was the city's representative on the Corridor Management Committee for the Southwest light rail line. She later sponsored legislation to fund dementia-response training for law enforcement based on the group's recommendations.

After the DFL won the majority in 2018, Youakim chaired the House Education Policy Committee for the 2019–20 biennium. Her 2019 omnibus policy bill drew Republican objections over proposed changes to the tiered teacher licensure system, and in 2020 she advanced a pared-down bill after those provisions and school discipline changes were dropped during the COVID-19 pandemic. She chaired the Property Tax Division of the Taxes Committee in 2021 and 2022. She has repeatedly sponsored bills to let school districts start classes before Labor Day in years when the holiday falls late in September, over the objections of the resort and tourism industry.

Youakim was the House author of the Hometown Heroes Assistance Program, a bipartisan measure that provides critical-illness benefits, mental health resources, and training for Minnesota's roughly 20,000 firefighters, who face elevated rates of cancer and heart disease. First introduced in 2019, it was enacted in 2021 with Senator Jeff Howe as Senate author and $4 million in annual funding. She authored an extension of the program in 2022 and an update that passed the House unanimously in 2025.

In 2023, with the DFL in control of both chambers and the governorship, Youakim became chair of the House Education Finance Committee and carried the omnibus education finance and policy bill with Senator Mary Kunesh. It also added civics and personal finance graduation requirements, banned American Indian mascots, replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day on school calendars, and required schools to offer ethnic studies. School district groups complained within months that the mandates had absorbed much of the new money; Youakim said the law had closed about a third of the inflation-adjusted funding gap accumulated over the previous two decades. In 2024 she sponsored a $43 million supplemental bill, most of it for READ Act teacher training and pre-kindergarten, and amended it on the floor to give the Department of Education's inspector general subpoena power to investigate fraud.

After the 2024 election produced a 67–67 tie, Youakim became co-chair of the Education Finance Committee alongside Republican Ron Kresha under the House power-sharing agreement. The 2025 education budget she sponsored added $44.3 million over the forecast base while cutting school library aid and other programs. Negotiations nearly stalled over Republican demands to repeal unemployment insurance for hourly school workers; Youakim eventually agreed to fund the benefit for one more year and end it after the 2028–29 school year, which she called her biggest disappointment of the session.

In 2026, following the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting, Youakim sponsored a DFL school safety bill that would have required districts to adopt security systems and increased student support personnel aid. Republicans criticized it for excluding nonpublic and tribal schools, and it failed on a party-line committee vote along with the competing Republican proposal; no school safety legislation passed before the session ended.

Committee assignments Youakim serves on the following committees in the 2025–26 session: Education Finance (co-chair) Taxes Ways and Means

Personal life Youakim married Jacques Youakim, a teacher in the Hopkins public schools, in 1992. They have three children and live in Hopkins.

Electoral history