Feeding our Future defendant sentenced to 43 months

A 54-year-old Minnesota woman has been sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for her role in the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme. According to the U.S. District Attorney’s Office, Sharon Denise Ross of Willernie, Minnesota will also have three years of supervised release for her role that exploited a federally funded child nutrition program during the COVID-19 pandemic. The news was announced on Friday by Acting U.S. Attorney Lisa D. Kirkpatrick.

In handing down the sentence Friday, Judge Nancy E. Brasel commented that Ross “used a position of trust in the community” for her own “flagrant personal gain.” Judge Brasel further noted that Ross’s crime was all the more aggravating because she acquired large amounts of fraudulent money in an “extremely short time span’ while Ross was on probation for another fraud.

Ross was also ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $2,434,360 as well as ordered to forfeit all property received from fraud proceeds, including her house in Willernie.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota, Ross was charged in a 12-count indictment on March 7, 2023, with wire fraud and money laundering for her role in devising and carrying out a multi-million dollar scheme to defraud the Federal Child Nutrition Program.

Ross pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud on January 10, 2024.

According to court documents, Ross was the executive director of House of Refuge Twin Cities, a St. Paul-based non-profit which she enrolled in the Federal Child Nutrition Program under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future and Partners in Nutrition. Ross claimed that House of Refuge operated distribution sites at a dozen locations throughout the Twin Cities that served food by a vendor called Brava Café, a restaurant in Minneapolis run by Hanna Marakegn. Between September 2021 through February 2022, Ross falsely claimed to be serving thousands of children each day at her House of Refuge sites, which included fraudulently claiming to feed children at multiple area churches. In total, Ross fraudulently claimed to have served nearly 900,000 meals and she received approximately $2.4 million in fraudulent Federal Child Nutrition Program funds. Ross distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to family members and used the rest of the money to fund her lifestyle, including to pay for vacations to Florida and Las Vegas, to purchase a suite at a Minnesota Timberwolves game, and to purchase her house in Willernie.

The case is the result of an investigation by the FBI, IRS – Criminal Investigations, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.