Vance to End Remaining Charity

GOP candidate started two nonprofits beginning in 2016
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Aug 15, 2024 4:40 PM CDT
Vance to End Remaining Charity
Sen. JD Vance speaks at a campaign event at VFW Post 92 in New Kensington, Pa., on Thursday.   (AP Photo/Matt Freed)

Sen. JD Vance is preparing to dissolve the vestiges of a charitable effort he launched in Ohio after publication of his bestselling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," the Republican vice presidential nominee's campaign said. Vance formed two like-named nonprofits starting in 2016 to address problems in Ohio and other Rust Belt states, the AP reports. They were primarily supposed to focus on boosting job opportunities, improving mental health treatment, and combatting the opioid crisis. The original organization folded within five years, and Vance put the other on hold when he ran successfully for the Senate in 2022.

He faced criticism during that race over how little the groups accomplished. Despite Vance's stated intentions to identify and produce national solutions to those problems, the nonprofits' only notable achievement was paying to send an addiction specialist to southern Ohio for a year who had questioned the well-documented role of prescription painkillers in the national opioid crisis. Vance has acknowledged that the groups' efforts fell far short of his aspirations. One of the groups—a foundation—filed paperwork in April reinstating the corporate status it had allowed to expire in 2022. The nonprofits were named Our Ohio Renewal and Our Ohio Renewal Foundation.

Trump campaign spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk said that filing was required because the foundation still had money left in its bank account and did not signal that Vance intended to resume the foundation's efforts. She said he plans to close out its accounts and distribute the remaining balance to causes benefiting Appalachia, per the AP. Records the group filed with the state and obtained by the AP through a public records request show it reported about $11,000 remaining in the foundation's account. The foundation appears to have raised and spent only about $69,000 from 2017 to 2023—although figures in its annual reports don't all add up.

(More JD Vance stories.)

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