Nonprofit claimed to provide daily brown-bag meals to thousands of Dallas students — schools say they got nothing

A Dallas nonprofit organization is under fire after a local news investigation found evidence that they were taking money while failing to provide the meals they promised to students.

The board of the Hunger Busters organization called for the resignation of CEO Latame Phillips after KTVT-TV reports documented that many schools hadn’t even heard of the group.

‘I look at the kids that we serve, and they remind me of myself.’

Hunger Busters has been in operation for 25 years in West Dallas and said its mission was to provide meals for “food-insecure” students in the Dallas Independent School District.

The organization has had many notable figures on its board and ran numerous charity events to raise money for the cause. The trouble appeared to begin in 2023 when Phillips became the CEO after starting as a delivery driver at the nonprofit.

He said at the time that they fed about 3,500 students on a daily basis.

“I look at the kids that we serve, and they remind me of myself,” Phillips claimed.

In 2024, he applied for a grant through the Tyler Street Foundation to buy a van for the nonprofit. The foundation president said the organization was thrilled to help, when it was bombarded with another request claiming the nonprofit needed emergency funds to purchase the property it operated from.

The foundation gave Hunger Busters $116,200 to make both purchases.

When they took a photo with the new van, the foundation president got suspicious.

“There was just a magnetic sign stuck on it that said ‘Tyler Street Foundation supports Hunger Busters.’ We really began to be curious. There was just something about that day that seemed off,” Vivian Skinner said.

She said they found out the van was a rental and the group had provided fake documentation. Then they found that Hunger Busters had not purchased the property either.

The Tyler Street Foundation has filed a lawsuit against Hunger Busters.

The investigative team found that there was little to no activity at the group’s property related to the mission and that none of the schools it served had received any food for a year. Some of the schools reported their last delivery to have been longer than a year ago.

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Phillips denied the allegations and said the organization had changed its mission to support “churches, community-based organizations, and partner nonprofits,” but refused to provide names of those organizations.

The board has since said that it has “unanimously approved an independent forensic accounting investigation” and plans on “restructuring the organization to strengthen financial oversight, operation, and internal controls.”

The organization’s website has been shut down, as well as its Instagram and Facebook accounts.

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