The Board That Wasn’t There
A Treasurer Reads the Feeding Our Future Trial
John Senkler is a service-industry worker in Saint Paul. According to the federal record, he was the secretary of the board of directors of Feeding Our Future, a Minnesota 501(c)(3) that funneled more than $240 million in federal child-nutrition reimbursements to a network of more than 250 meal sites that, federal prosecutors say, served little or no food to actual children. Last year, on the witness stand, Senkler said he hadn’t known he was on the board (Sahan Journal, 2025). He hadn’t attended meetings. He didn’t know what a motion was. And the signature on the minutes, the one that said he had made a motion to approve a transaction, wasn’t his signature.
That signature is the spine of this piece, so hold on to it.
The trajectory
On May 21, 2026, Aimee Bock was sentenced to 500 months in federal prison and ordered to pay approximately $243 million in restitution (Minnesota Reformer, 2026). Forty-one years and eight months. Federal prosecutors had asked for 50; her defense had asked for three. The judge sat in the middle and told Bock, “This was a vortex of fraud, and you were at the epicenter.”
Nine years earlier, in November 2016, Bock had incorporated Feeding Our Future as a small Minnesota nonprofit with two co-incorporators from her previous employer, the established meal-program nonprofit Partners in Nutrition. By 2019, she was disbursing about $3.4 million in federal funds. By 202,1 she was disbursing nearly $200 million (United States Department of Justice, 2022). The Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor later determined that her reimbursements grew approximately 2,800 percent in one year (Office of the Legislative Auditor, 2024).
That is the rise. The fall is the FBI raid in January 2022 and the trial that ended last March.
The hollowing-out
The trajectory is the story. And the trajectory is the architecture as much as it is Aimee Bock.
Federal child nutrition funds do not flow directly from the USDA to meal sites. It flows from the USDA to state agencies, then from state agencies to what federal regulations call “sponsoring organizations,” and finally from the sponsoring organization to the actual sites where meals are supposed to be served. The sponsoring organization is the pass-through. In Feeding Our Future’s case, the sponsoring organization was a 501(c)(3) public charity with a recognized board of three.
Three names on the charter. Two of whom testified at trial that they did not know they were directors.
A board is the substantive accountability that the law assumes is there when it grants a nonprofit corporation tax-exempt status and lets it stand between the federal treasury and a meal site. Not an HR formality. Not three names you pull from a phonebook to satisfy the Secretary of State. The law gives a 501(c)(3) organization the privilege of being treated as a charitable entity rather than as a person with a checking account, and, in return, it requires an oversight body that actually oversees. Take the board out, leave the form in place, and the architecture still looks correct from a hundred yards. The state agency sends the reimbursements. The Form 990s get filed. Until they don’t.
What a real board looks like
I sit on two nonprofit boards. I’m treasurer of one of them. So I know what a treasurer actually does, and what a treasurer’s report looks like.
A treasurer reads bank statements. A treasurer compares the bank statements to the books. A treasurer asks why the line item for one program went from $300,000 to $30 million in eight months. A treasurer notices that operating revenue jumps 2,800 percent, but there are not 2,800 percent more meals being served. A treasurer asks the question and refuses to leave the room until somebody answers it. And when no one will, a treasurer calls the state attorney general’s charities division and asks for a callback.
Jamie Phelps, listed as Feeding Our Future’s treasurer, was a mechanic from Eagan who told the federal court he had never attended a board meeting (Sahan Journal, 2025). I have never met him. I have no opinion on whether he is a good or a bad man. I do have an opinion on what it means to put a stranger’s name on a treasurer’s line to satisfy a state incorporation requirement. It means the law’s substantive expectation of fiduciary care has been performed, but not done.
The performed version costs nothing. The done version is hard. You have to read documents you would rather not read. You have to ask questions in front of people who would rather you didn’t. You have to be willing to be the wet blanket at the meeting and the one who gets called paranoid afterward in the parking lot. You have to keep doing it for years, for free, since that is what the IRS letter you accepted on the organization’s behalf said you would do.
