Video: Somali women celebrate Aimee Bock and Feeding Our Future

In an undated video sent to American Experiment, a group of Somali women appear to be giving Feeding Our Future CEO Aimee Bock an award. After they present her with the award, they begin hugging her, giving her high fives and chanting her name.

Aimee! Aimee! Aimee!

The text under the video says: Thank you very much Feeding Our Future/Aimee Bock for fighting for minorities.

Bock of course was charged this week for her role in bilking the Federal government out of hundreds of millions of dollars that should have gone to feeding hungry children during the pandemic of 2020-21. Instead, vendors to Bock’s nonprofit are alleged to have set up a computer program to generate fake student names and enroll them in the feeding program. Rather of feeding low-income children suffering at the height of the pandemic, Bock and her associates (47 have been charged so far) used the money to purchase luxury cars, houses, jewelry, and coastal resort properties abroad.

After everything we know now, this video is disturbing. Were the women celebrating the successful fraud? Did they participate in the fraud? Have some of these women been indicted? Or did some Somali children actually receive free meals from Feeding Our Future? According to Bill Glahn’s extensive coverage of this story, some meals were delivered to low-income children in Minnesota. But we now know the vast majority were fake.

This is at least the second major scandal involving fraud within the Somali community in Minnesota, the other involving a similar scheme with fake childcare enrollments. Two things must be happening in order for this to occur. First, there must be forces or people outside the Somali community eager to take advantage of them to commit fraud and enrich themselves. But there are also must be people inside the Somali community eager to participate in the fraud.

Kudos to the FBI and US Attorney Andy Luger for holding the outside forces like Aimee Bock and Feeding Our Future accountable. We also need people inside the Somali community to be vigilant and guarded when people show up at their door pretending to “help” with government money in hand.