No evidence Gavin Newsom donated $12M to feed children because Obama asked

A rumor that circulated online in December 2025 claimed that California Gov. Gavin Newsom had donated $12 million of his own money to feed hungry children. According to social media posts sharing the claim, Newsom donated the money after seeing that former U.S. President Barack Obama was promoting the initiative. Snopes readers emailed us to ask whether the rumor was true.

For instance, on Dec. 3, the Facebook page Capitol Spotlight posted (archived) the claim. The post displayed photos of Newsom and Obama, and began:

Six hours. That’s all it took…. Late Thursday night, Barack Obama posted four quiet lines: Too many kids are going to sleep hungry tonight. If you’re able, help fix it. No link. No fanfare. Just a plea from a man who still feels every empty stomach like it’s his own.

Other Facebook users shared the same claim, which generally featured the exact same text, a style known as copypasta. Some of those posts featured links in top comments leading to articles hosted by WordPress blogs.

However, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no news media outlets reporting about Newsom’s supposed charity. Prominent news media outlets would have widely reported this rumor, if true.

Rather, whoever authored the story fabricated the entire tale as one of hundreds of inspirational tales that depicted prominent people performing inspiring acts of kindness. They aimed to earn advertising revenue on websites linked from the aforementioned Facebook posts. The story about Newsom and Obama amounted to fiction.

The social media posts claimed that Newsom had been inspired by a post from Obama, so Snopes checked Obama’s social media profiles for such a post. None existed. Second, the claim listed a charity named the “American Community Relief Initiative” as the recipient of Newsom’s work, but there is no charity with that name. 

Third, the story supposedly took place in Indiana — in “a nondescript community center on the south side of South Bend.” While Newsom has no ties to Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic candidate for president in 2020 and transportation secretary under former President Joe Biden, got his start in politics as mayor of South Bend. Snopes found several social media posts sharing a nearly identical claim featuring Buttigieg instead of Newsom.

It appears the claim originally featured Buttigieg, as posts sharing the claim about Buttigieg were timestamped prior to the claim about Newsom. (The Buttigieg version of the claim also lacked evidence.) Newsom’s name was simply swapped in for Buttigieg’s, likely in an effort to produce more posts and make more advertising revenue.

For further reading, Snopes previously reported on another fictitious story claiming that Buttigieg and Obama had announced an initiative called “Project Unity.”