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But by 2021, Feeding Our Future was handling $197 million in annual funding.
Under its umbrella, the indictments said, six different groups began to operate similar frauds. The conspirators would often register new companies or nonprofits, then quickly sign them up as feeding operations under the supervision of Feeding Our Future.
Then, the indictments said, the new groups would soon report that they were feeding thousands of children per day — numbers that put them among the biggest feeding operations in the state — and began reaping thousands or millions of dollars in federal payments. In Minneapolis, for instance, a man named Guhaad Hashi Said told the state that he was serving 5,000 meals, twice a day, at a new facility called Advance Youth Athletic Development.
The site he listed was an unlikely place for anyone to feed children en masse: The address was a second-story apartment.
Mr. Said was one of those indicted; the indictment said he was paid $2.9 million out of federal money routed through the state and Feeding Our Future. But the indictment said that Mr. Said provided “only a fraction” of the meals he claimed. In an interview this year, Mr. Said said that he had never claimed to serve 5,000 meals a day in the first place.
In 2020, Minnesota officials grew concerned by the speed at which Feeding Our Future was creating new distribution sites and began giving them more scrutiny.
In November of that year, the nonprofit responded defiantly, filing a lawsuit that accused state officials of discrimination. The suit said the state was harming children by delaying the start of Feeding Our Future’s new operations. “Every day that goes by, hundreds of the state’s most vulnerable children are going without much needed meals,” it said.
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