A small, dormant charity founded by Senator JD Vance in 2017 is believed to be closing.
So far, he hasn’t.
Last month, Donald J told the Associated Press That Mr. Vance, Republican of Ohio, was preparing to close Our Ohio Renewal Foundation And give the rest of his money to “benefit Appalachia.”
This week, Ohio officials said no one had yet filed the paperwork to close Mr. Vance’s foundation, which had just $11,000 in the bank as of March. Mr. Vance is not required by nonprofit or campaign law to close the group.
Neither the Trump campaign nor the nonprofit’s own accountant responded to questions from The New York Times about the nonprofit’s future.
That leaves our Ohio Renewal Foundation as a kind of charitable time capsule, a frozen relic of a different time in Mr. Vance’s life.
Mr. Vance founded that group in 2017, when he was best known as the author of a best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and was still an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump. After the success of his book, Mr. Vance quit his job as a venture capitalist in California and moved back to Ohio. But he denied rumors that he intended to run for the office.
Instead, Mr. Vance said, he came back to start two nonprofits.
This will combat issues plaguing their own families: opioid addiction, unemployment, broken families. In paperwork filed with the IRS’s nonprofit division, the nonprofits said they plan to collectively raise more than $3 million, and that they will “make it easier for underprivileged children to achieve their dreams.”
“I never wanted to be a public intellectual or a talking head,” Mr. Vance said The Washington Post in 2017. “I actually care about solving some of these things.”
None of his groups made a significant impact on Ohio.
The larger of the two, a politically active nonprofit called Our Ohio Renewal, was to lobby for changes in state policy. He raised $220,000: Mr. Vance said he gave a total of $80,000 personally. But the group was not a lobbying force: it published two op-eds and a A pair of tweets. Tax filings show he spent most of his money paying his staff.
The group also paid $45,000 for a survey of “social, cultural and general welfare needs of Ohio citizens.” Some former employees said they never saw the results of that survey, even though it used 20 percent of the group’s annual budget.
That’s what former employees of the nonprofit said The New York Times in 2022 That they believe the real goal was to launch Mr. Vance’s own political career. The nonprofit paid a man who also served as one of Mr. Vance’s political advisers, and it also paid an aide who arranged Mr. Vance’s speeches to GOP groups around the state, according to a former staffer at the group.
That nonprofit closed in March 2021. Mr. Vance announced He was considering running for the Senate in May.
The nonprofit that still exists, Our Ohio Renewal Foundation, was organized as a traditional charity. According to Ohio nonprofit records, he raised about $64,350, and spent most of that money on a single project. The foundation paid for the psychiatrist spend a year One Ohio town hit hard by opioids.
After that, nothing.
Ohio records show the foundation has not spent a single dollar on charitable activity since 2019.
In Mr. Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign, Democrats turned his nonprofit into an attack. Advertisement: “JD Vance was really in a position to help people, but he only helped himself.”
In the past, Mr. Vance has blamed the group’s ineffectiveness on unfortunate circumstances. He said he turned his management over to a law-school friend, who was then diagnosed with cancer.
“I’m not going to pretend that it didn’t derail our plans a bit and distract us for a while. did it But I also think that even with that disruption, we’ve done some good things and never said we were doing anything we weren’t,” he said. 2021.
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