COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – Republican vice presidential nominee U.S. Sen. JD Vance is preparing to break up the legacy of a charity he started in Ohio after the release of his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” his campaign said.
Starting in 2016, Vance founded two organizations of the same name to address issues in Ohio and other “Rust Belt” states. They were primarily intended to focus on increasing job opportunities, improving mental health care and combating the opioid crisis. The original organization disbanded within five years, and Vance put another one on hold when he successfully ran for the Senate in 2022.
He faced criticism during the competition for how little the groups achieved. Despite Vance’s stated intentions to find and produce national solutions to these problems, the nonprofit’s only significant accomplishment was paying to send an addiction expert to southern Ohio for a year who had questioned the well-documented role of prescription drugs in the national opioid crisis. Vance has admitted that the groups’ efforts fell far short of his hopes.
One of the groups — the foundation — filed paperwork in April to reinstate corporate status, which it had let expire in 2022.
Taylor Van Kirk, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, told The Associated Press that the filing was required because the foundation still had money left in the bank account and did not indicate Vance intended to continue the foundation’s efforts. He said he plans to close its accounts and distribute the remaining balance to causes that benefit Appalachia.
Records filed by the group with the state and obtained by the AP through a public records request show that it reported having about $11,000 left in the foundation’s account.
Vance’s first nonprofit, Our Ohio Renewal, was founded shortly after “Hillbilly Elegy” was published in 2016. It was registered as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. Such groups can accept candidates, although this one never did. Its payments were not tax deductible. Vance said his goal was to raise $500,000 a year to fund that work.
A year later, he created the Our Ohio Renewal Foundation. As a 501(c)(3) charitable group, it operates with more restrictions, but also allows donors to receive tax deductions for donations.
The groups couldn’t catch up, in part because a key organizer was diagnosed with cancer. Ohio Renewal reported raising $221,000 in 2018 — $80,000 of which came from Vance’s own money. After that, it raised less than $50,000 a year before closing in 2021, people in the know indicate.
Meanwhile, the foundation appears to have raised and spent only about $69,000 between 2017 and 2023 — though the numbers in its annual reports don’t all add up. Jai Chabria, a political adviser to Vance who previously worked as a consultant to the foundation, and the campaign could not explain the differences, citing the passage of time and personnel changes.
The AP reported in 2022 that Vance’s philanthropically funded residency in Ironton, Ohio, was overshadowed by a dispute between him, the American Enterprise Institute, where he was a research fellow, and Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. Satel referenced Purdue-funded research in some of his writings when he was paid by the institute, which at the time was receiving funding from the drugmaker, according to ProPublica reports.
According to Vance’s Senate campaign, the candidate — whose family experience with addiction featured heavily in his book and helped with his philanthropic work — had not been familiar with Satel’s Purdue research in his work when he was selected for the 2018 residency. But he said he was proud of her work in treating patients in one of Ohio’s worst-hit areas.
At the time, Satel said he reached his conclusions independently, and AEI said it maintains a firewall between its researchers and donors.
