Like the famous Griggs-Midway building in St. Paul, Alpha News has found an address in Rochester with lots of interesting connections. They report,
Under one Rochester roof: DFL office, mosque, Somali community center and six transportation companies.
And that’s not all. The building also houses five licensed Medicaid service providers, two of whom currently have their licenses in “revoked” status.
Alpha News reports on activity in the building’s Suite 212, which shook loose a years-old memory from the Feeding Our Future scandal. An earlier tenant in that same suite, an unrelated nonprofit company, claimed to operate a 2,000 meal/day free food distribution site there.
Children Food Relief was incorporated in July 2021 and was based in Minneapolis. It received its IRS tax-exempt status that same month. It registered a food distribution site in The 1500 Building that year under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future’s main rival, Partners in Nutrition, d/b/a Partners in Quality Care.
Back in March 2022, I dug into the free-food operations within the City of Rochester. Naturally, the local public school district ran the largest operation. The second largest effort was under the Partners in Nutrition banner, with a capacity to feed more than 10,000 children per day, at least on paper. Partners’ Rochester operation dwarfed the capacity of rivals Youth Leadership Academy, d/b/a Gar Gaar Family Services at 4,500 and Feeding Our Future itself, at a mere 3,200.
When the state Dept. of Education (MDE) shut down Partners in January 2022, Children Food Relief was left holding the bag with two unpaid invoices. None the less, Children Food Relief continued to participate in an effort (ultimately unsuccessful) to gain readmission to the free-food program.
Alas, it does not appear that Children Food Relief stuck around long enough to file a tax return. Its tax-exempt status was revoked by the IRS in 2024.
Perhaps Nick Shirley himself should pay a visit to The 1500 Building.
