by Aswad Walker
It’s a story of both devastation and resilience.
Stripped of the vehicle through which the Porters honored their life’s calling, though demonized, demoralized and devastated financially, the Porters quietly continued to find ways to feed hungry children without the glare of the public eye. Still, neither was ever the same.
The public telling of the untold history of a Black female U.S. Army unit’s heroism in the face of battlefield enemy fire and the “friendly fire” of U.S. racism resonated with Porter’s spirit.
It also reawakened old wounds.
Perry’s movie moved Porter to break her 23-year silence on the demise of the non-profit Kid Care, which she and Hurt grew from a kitchen-table start-up to a global force that fed more than 20,000 children and adults a month.
The pair garnered hundreds of awards and international acclaim. Porter appeared on Oprah and Ricki Lake, no less. She addressed the United Nations and consulted to help other countries recreate the Kid Care magic.
But all of that came crashing down in 2002 when over 40 newscasts by Dolcefino, a TV reporter notorious for sensational stories, leveled charges of theft and financial abuse against them; charges that were eventually proven false. But their exoneration came after Abbott erroneously declared Kid Care as “the worst case of charitable abuse in 10 years’ history in the state of Texas.”
However, the silent exoneration garnered little public attention and left Kid Care and Porter’s good names sullied, seemingly forever.
Humble beginnings
Before founding Kid Care, the Porters fed Houston-area homeless people and hungry children wherever they could find them via generous donations from Whole Foods. It’s just who they were and what they did.
But everything changed when Porter saw children digging for food in a McDonald’s dumpster one day.
“[The store’s manager] told me that kids from a nearby apartment complex did that every day, and I just saw that as unacceptable,” said Porter, who immediately made provisions to feed those hungry children that day.
That day turned into a life’s mission, one Hurt viewed as unsustainable since the pair financed their work off their working-class salaries.
“For five years, we fed the children and the community and nobody knew we were there. We just did it on our own,” recalled Porter. “Hurt said to me, ‘Carol, we have got to devise a method to teach these people to fish, or we’re gonna have second and third-generation care recipients like welfare.’”
Hurt also pushed Carol to seek publicity, believing that support would come if others knew what the Porters were doing.
He was right.
Publicity
That much-needed publicity came first in the form of then-KHOU reporter Norm Uhl’s coverage of Kid Care.
Uhl was assigned to do a story on hungry white children, a demographic many Houstonians didn’t know existed, even though their numbers were growing at an alarming rate. A friend suggested he speak with Carol Porter.
“When they started off, they were doing hot meals, putting them in the back of their old beat-up B210 Datsun station wagon, and driving this stuff over there and feeding these kids,” recalled Uhl, who accompanied the Porters on multiple food runs. “They were doing this every night, pretty much after work.
“When we pulled up, all these kids started coming out from everywhere in the apartment complex going, ‘Carol, Carol, Carol.’ I mean, they all knew her.”
Uhl produced multiple stories on the Porters and Kid Care, including Carol’s trip to Bogota, Colombia, where she advised Colombian officials on starting their own children-focused “Meals-on-Wheels” program.
Additionally, Brad Levy, the news director at Houston’s Channel 20, played Kid Care commercials in constant rotation and placed billboards around the city free of charge. The exposure transformed the Porter family operation into a full-blown non-profit with a steady stream of dedicated volunteers.
The positive press didn’t stop there.
When the City of Houston Health Department sought to prevent Kid Care operations from preparing meals in their “unregulated” home kitchens, the Los Angeles Times article “Woman Who Feeds 300 Poor Children Fights City Hall” on May 17, 1994, turned out to be a game-changer.
“The fight with the [Houston] health department gave us national publicity… and more people donating and volunteering,” said Porter.
So too did a Feb. 6, 1995, New York Times article that described Porter as the “Mother Teresa of Houston.”
As the notoriety, donations and volunteer numbers increased, so too did Kid Care’s service offerings.
The small but mighty Kid Care had grown from adopting one apartment complex to serving multiple ones, in addition to the thousands of youth and parents they served in other settings. Feeding children became just one aspect of their work, which expanded to include year-round educational and empowerment activities.
The couple created the Kid Care Preschool program, a bevvy of year-round activities, including a Preschool Learning Academy and an annual six-week-long summer camp.
During one ballet performance attended by Kid Care and Uhl, four-year-old Jasmine was wowed by what she saw. But when Uhl asked her if she’d thought about becoming a ballerina, Jasmine told him she couldn’t because she was Black.
“Just seconds after that, Lauren Anderson comes on stage, and Jasmine’s eyes got this big, and she turned to me and said, ‘You know, maybe I can do that,’” said Uhl. “This is the kind of stuff that touched my heart.”
Carol even took youth who had never ventured out of their neighborhoods to Washington D.C., where they enjoyed “backstage” access to and audiences with U.S. Congress members.
Another aspect of Kid Care’s offerings involved Hurt’s passion to help turn boys into men.
“My husband would give the Kid Care ‘Sermon on the Mount.’ He’d tell the young men, ‘Integrity, honor, that’s the only way you can be successful. Not stealing, not being disrespectful to authority,’” recalled Porter. “Oh boy. He was so great with the Black young men, the Hispanic and the white young men. To many of them, he was dad.”
Still, Kid Care’s primary focus was feeding hungry children and their families. That part of the operations got a major upgrade when renowned chef and national restaurant founder Wayne Webb returned to Houston after a whirlwind year of founding restaurants in four different cities.
Webb wanted to focus on serving the community rather than growing his net worth, so Webb connected with Carol. And on a “salary” of $400/month, Webb coordinated everything food-related and helped raise the number of people who received Kid Care meals to roughly 23,000 per month.
Webb also oversaw what became a highly successful catering business.
“It was all with an end goal of really and truly impacting the community,” said Webb, who envisioned great things when Kid Care was able to access an 11,500 square-foot building out of which to move operations out of the Porters’ north Houston home.
Webb said the vision included expanding the catering service and opening a restaurant.
“We were very fortunate to get Wayne. Kid Care’s dreams became his. And he cooked for presidents,” said Porter.
Webb also planned to do more, including training homeless people hired as dishwashers to become cooks.
National and international acclaim
With all this activity emerging from a volunteer-heavy entity, people took notice. Literally.
People Magazine named Carol “Mother of Them All” for her volunteer efforts. She was featured on ABC national news as “Person of the Week” with Peter Jennings. She and Hurt won over 200 awards, including an Essence Award for volunteer excellence. The Porters and Kid Care were named a 1,000 Points of Light designee (number 866) by then-President George H.W. Bush.
As a guest on the Ricki Lake Show, Publishers’ Clearinghouse surprised Carol with a volunteer award and a personal $10,000 check. She led a workshop at the United Nations in February 2002 during a special session on children. Her topic: “Ending Hunger among Children globally through a Meals on Wheels concept.”
In March 2002, Porter gave a lecture at the prestigious Million Dollar Roundtable (MDR), a platform known to open doors for participants to become in-demand America Speaking Bureau members.
After wowing the 7,500-MDR crowd and being invited to over 40 countries, Carol envisioned a new role for her and Hurt.
“I said, ‘Wow, I could spend the rest of my life raising money and starting Meals on Wheels programs for kids all over the United States and beyond,” she said.
Carol and Hurt planned to give the Kid Care executive director reins to Levy as the couple worked to make Kid Care’s global expansion a reality.
“I’ll never forget [South Africa’s] Bishop Tutu told me, ‘Carol, we need your program in my country and in all of Africa,’” she recalled from their meeting in the early 2000s when Kid Care sponsored Tutu’s Houston visit.
Allegations
But those dreams came crashing down when allegations that Carol and Hurt were using Kid Care donations to fund a lavish lifestyle became daily must-see TV via the 40-plus investigative news reports by Dolcefino.
One of those “lavish” charges included a Kid Care American Express card charge made at Houston’s Gold Cup Strip Club.
Additionally, Abbott sued the Porters for misuse of funds, shut down Kid Care and ordered another charity for children to open (without the Porters’ involvement) in its place. The IRS also claimed the Porters owed $550,000 in unreported income.
“I was accused of stealing $1,600,000 from my charity… [by] Wayne Dolcefino, who was known for destroying Black and Brown leaders,” said Porter. “We were destroyed. Literally, the money dried up. And that was the end of our feeding program,” Porter recalled.
She said that initially, Kid Care donations continued to come in, and her friends remained loyal. But everything changed after Dolcefino’s series of over 40 news stories.
Dolcefino did not respond to the Defender’s request for an interview.
Silent exoneration
In the end, the Porters were exonerated. They were guilty only of being less than meticulous with their record-keeping, leading to accounting issues one independent investigator said were “typical of non-profits.” The Porters were also probably too trusting of some individuals within their organization who took advantage of their kind-heartedness.
This includes the employee to whom those Gold Cup Strip Club and other non-Kid Care mission-related charges were eventually traced.
Few, if any, ever knew that KTRK did a retraction of an erroneous report by Dolcefino that the Porters used charity funds to pay property taxes. Fewer still knew that in April 2004, Abbott dropped the Porters from his lawsuit.
Almost no one realized that Abbott’s head investigator on the Porter/Kid Care case (Susan Staricka) released a statement saying, ” The evidence… could suggest that Carol and Hurt Porter Jr. did not engage in any intentionally malicious or fraudulent conduct.”
“Despite the slanderous media onslaught leveled against them, in the end, the evidence and facts proved their innocence,” said family friend Dr. Abdul Haleem (Robert) Muhammad. “Justice demands their good names and reputation be restored.
“Justice also demands that those who are responsible for unjustifiably destroying their life’s work, thereby causing childhood hunger to perpetuate in Houston and beyond, must be punished by God’s hand in this world and the Hereafter if those parties refuse to repent.”
Uhl laments that Kid Care’s destruction placed a major roadblock before someone he considered a visionary.
“[The Porters] were gonna put volunteer doctors, PAs, in a clinic [in their Kid Care building] to help these families, parents and kids with medical issues,” stated Uhl. “They were gonna do a dental clinic. They were gonna do an eye exam clinic. Carol was the first person I ever heard propose the idea to put PAs and small clinics in drug stores to provide affordable healthcare in neighborhoods. What happened years later? They all [drugstores] have clinics now.”
Impact
But the damage was done, including emotional damage to Carol and Hurt.
“My husband was never the same after that. He couldn’t protect me. I was his wife, and he couldn’t protect me. He was never the same,” shared Porter, who said she was ostracized by the general public and by one-time friends, including members of her church.
Over the years, Carol leaned heavily on the supportive words of the late Joseph Samuels, a friend and owner of the Jewish Herald-Voice.
“He would constantly tell me, ‘Carol, don’t ever quit. Keep fighting, and the truth will come out. But whatever you do, don’t stop fighting,’” shared Carol.
David Goldberg, former KHOU news director, attended the funeral for Hurt, who passed away on Nov. 4, 2024. He was reminded of the honorable man Hurt was, and of the sketchy nature of the media attacks on Kid Care.
“The accountant for Carol was there [at Hurt’s funeral],” shared Goldberg. “I had a conversation with him and I said, ‘I just don’t understand why this happened.’ He responded, ‘I don’t either because they never talked to me.’ So, the report was done, and they never talked to the primary person who took care of the books. And he said, ‘To this day, I will never understand it.’”
“It’s one of those things when you have something that’s going really well, the enemy gets in and literally, within and without, there were attacks,” said Webb. “It was unfortunate.”
“I tell people all the time, helping people for me is a drug. It makes me happy,” said Carol. “It makes me so sad when I think about what we could have done, how many more kids could have graduated from high school. How many kids we could have helped get to college.”
Aftermath
Nearly a quarter of a century later, most Houstonians who remember the Kid Care saga thought the story ended with the assertion made clear by Disney-owned ABC 13’s 40-plus broadcasts – that the Porters were guilty as charged.
Were Carol and Hurt guilty of less-than-stellar record-keeping? Probably. Could the Porters and Kid Care have been better served by a more engaged board of directors? Absolutely. Might Kid Care have profited from a tighter structure or the Porters being slower to trust seemingly everyone who came within their sphere of influence? Possibly.
But they also could have been better served had the same energy been given to sharing with the general public news of their exoneration that was invested in reporting accusations that later proved false.
A Texas Observer article reported that in 2000, Dini Partners, a non-profit consulting group brought in to study the charity, described Kid Care as “a high-performing not-for-profit” that was only “guilty” of operating under a “not well-defined structure.”
Restitution
By way of restitution, Carol says she’d like an apology from Abbott, Texas’s current governor, and Dolcefino, though she doesn’t expect it, and has forgiven each of them for their roles in Kid Care’s demise.
What she wants most is for the Kid Care model to be reborn.
“I’ve been quiet for all these years; 23 years. We were wounded. Our monies were taken. I was denied a livelihood. We lived on Social Security and miracles, and we still help people,” said Porter, referring to the meals she continues to supply to people in need, supported once more by Whole Foods donations. But now, it’s not under the Kid Care banner.
“I’m willing to share Kid Care’s meals-on-wheels guidelines with anyone who wants to run one. It’s my hope that we can create a national meals-on-wheels program because kids are still hungry.”
She says those interested should write to Carol Doe Porter / Kid Care Inc. at PO Box 10307, Houston, TX 77206-0307 or email KidCareInc@gmail.com.
Beyond that, Carol’s wishes are simple – a publicly cleared name and a question answered.
“My dream has always been that the truth would come out. It’s not too late to feed the children. They’re hungry. The government can’t do it all. We have a responsibility as individuals,” said Carol.
“When they found out that I hadn’t stolen anything, we really believed that we were gonna be let back in the building. We were gonna be able to have Kid Care back,” said Carol. “So, to be denied access to the building, access to the program, and give the program away to somebody else… I was shocked.
“Why wasn’t [Kid Care] given back to us? What was the reason you took it from us? Because we were thieves? Now you find out we’re innocent, give it back.”
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