Photography by Victoria Gomez
The City of Dallas is ranked No. 2 in the nation for child hunger, and an Oak Cliff-based nonprofit is looking to change that.
Hunger Busters is an after-school feeding program that has provided over 1 million meals to children in Dallas who don’t have access to a third meal at home. CEO Latame Phillips has known he wanted to combat this issue from a young age.
Phillips was born in Mombasa, Kenya and raised in San Diego by immigrant parents. He moved to California at the age of 2, and lived in an immigrant community.
“When I say immigrants, I mean like the whole world,” Phillips says. “There were Asians, there were Africans, there were Hispanics. It was just basically an immigrant village.”
In third grade, Phillips took what was called the “California achievement test.” After taking the test, he was told he could not attend the same school and instead was bussed to a school across the city in a more affluent area.
“That’s when I realized I was poor,” Phillips says. “That was also the first time where food insecurity became like a big thing because the school was so affluent that they didn’t have a cafeteria, and so you were either supposed to bring your lunch, or your mom, dad, grandparents, nanny, or whatever, was supposed to bring your lunch and eat with you.”
From there, Phillips graduated high school and attended the University of Southern California.
“I worked in finance and was able to work my way into wealth management, and that’s when I saw tremendous social inequities,” Phillips says.
He ended up taking a job with Halliburton that moved him to Texas. When he left Halliburton, he started doing research on nonprofits and food insecurity to try to figure out how to bridge that gap.
“Too many times we look for the government, we look for a celebrity or an athlete to do things where the greatest innovations and the greatest changes and the greatest impact would come from regular, everyday people,” he says.
Phillips says that if you live in DFW, you are always less than 10 miles away from a child who’s food insecure. Solving this issue is imperative for the future.
Photography by Victoria Gomez
“There are so many systemic issues that come from malnutrition,” he says. “The three most notable things that we know is that obviously attendance goes down because a child feels like they’re sick. Behavior issues in the classroom increase. And then test scores go down. So these are issues that we have to address today if we want businesses and our society and our city to flourish.”
Phillips met someone affiliated with Hunger Busters, they formulated a partnership, and he took it over a few years later.
The organization is made possible through volunteerism. Companies, community groups, churches, fraternities and sororities come in and volunteer. They make the meals, and a small team goes out and delivers them to the after-school program.
“We feed dinner and we do it in a very healthy way,” Phillips says. “We go to places like Eatzi’s and Panera Bread and Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, and we pick up the food that did not sell, then we supplement it with purchases, and we fix a healthy, nutritious meal every day.”
There’s no canned or boxed goods. Food high in sodium and preservatives are avoided as much as possible. And the organization tries to make sure everything that’s served was made within the last 24-48 hours, according to Philips.
The students receive their meal between 5:30 and 6:00 p.m., and Phillips says the exact number is 3,489 students a day.
Hunger Busters is always looking to expand and serve more students.
Currently, they are looking to build a new facility that focuses on collaborative effort from various nonprofits. The goal is to help people progress in life from getting homes and filling basic needs.
“And so by us combining forces, we’ll be able to kind of have a unified plan in our communities with the children and obviously the families that we serve,” Phillips says. “People say that young people are the future, but that’s actually incorrect. They’re right now.”
