Our Ohio Renewal

The gap: two nonprofits, not one

Most accounts of J.D. Vance’s first attempt at philanthropy treat Our Ohio Renewal as a single charity that raised about $220,000 and then fizzled. What that shorthand misses — and what the Associated Press’s reporting establishes — is that “Our Ohio Renewal” was actually two separate legal entities with different tax statuses, different fundraising records, and different endings (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)).

Vance’s first nonprofit, Our Ohio Renewal, was formed starting in 2016 after the publication of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy and registered as a 501(c)(4) social-welfare organization — a structure that may endorse political candidates, though this one never did, and whose contributions are not tax-deductible (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). A year later he created a sibling, the Our Ohio Renewal Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable group operating with tighter restrictions but letting donors take tax deductions (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)).

The groups were supposed to address problems in Ohio and other “Rust Belt” states, with stated aims of boosting job opportunities, improving mental-health treatment, and combating the opioid crisis — though over the years Vance described the mission variously, from bringing new businesses to the Rust Belt to filling mental-health treatment gaps (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune); Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). Vance said his goal was to raise $500,000 a year to fund the work (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)).

The money that came — and where it went

The fundraising never approached that goal. Our Ohio Renewal reported raising $221,000 in 2018 — $80,000 of which was Vance’s own money — and less than $50,000 a year thereafter, before being shut down in 2021, according to state records (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). The foundation fared worse: it 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,” the AP wrote, noting that neither Jai Chabria, a Vance political adviser who had consulted to the foundation, nor the campaign could explain the discrepancies, citing the passage of time and personnel changes (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)).

The groups “failed to catch on, in part because a key organizer was diagnosed with cancer,” AP reported, without naming the person (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). On the campaign trail in 2022, Vance said his group stalled because a key staff member’s cancer diagnosis derailed it, and said he was proud of the work it did despite its short life (Inside Philanthropy).

Where the money went drew sharper scrutiny. An investigation by Business Insider found that Our Ohio Renewal spent more on “management services” than on programmatic work — and those management services were provided by the group’s executive director, who was also Vance’s top political adviser (Inside Philanthropy). The organization never joined the Ohio Opioid Education Alliance, the state’s large public-private anti-opioid coalition; a spokeswoman for the coalition told Business Insider she “hadn’t heard of Vance’s organization” (Inside Philanthropy). The group claimed it had launched a survey to explore Ohio residents’ needs but never revealed the results (Inside Philanthropy).

The Ironton residency: the one tangible program

The nonprofits’ “only notable achievement,” in AP’s words, was paying to send an addiction specialist to southern Ohio for a year — a psychiatrist whose views on the opioid crisis were themselves a source of controversy (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)).

Dr. Sally Satel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, began the yearlong residency in Ironton in September 2018 (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). The roughly $70,000 residency was overseen in part by D.R. Gossett, CEO of the Ironton-Lawrence County Community Action Organization, who said Satel “helped people who were struggling in southern Ohio” and that residents remained thankful for her presence (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). Vance said at the time he hoped Satel would use the experience to develop treatment methods that could be “scaled nationally” or produce a paper or book-length publication; she had done neither as of AP’s 2022 reporting (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)).

The problem was Satel’s paper trail. Documents and emails obtained by ProPublica for a 2019 investigation found that Satel, a senior AEI fellow, sometimes cited Purdue Pharma-funded studies and doctors in her addiction writings and occasionally shared article drafts with Purdue officials in advance, including in 2004 and 2016; AEI had received regular $50,000 donations and other support from Purdue totaling $800,000 (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). Satel told AP she “never consulted with” Purdue and never “took a cent” from the company, saying she relied on her own psychiatric experience and data, and AEI said it maintained a firewall between scholars and donors (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). Vance’s campaign said he was unfamiliar with Satel’s reliance on Purdue research when she was selected but remained proud of her patient work in “one of Ohio’s hardest hit areas” (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)).

Vance’s private reaction was less settled. In October 2020, after a friend emailed concern that Satel was headlining an AEI event on the opioid crisis “without a splash banner saying how much money AEI takes from Purdue Pharma,” Vance replied: “Yeah. It’s not good,” adding that he had a minor AEI affiliation and was “thinking about dropping it because of this and other things” — which he did, ending his nonresident fellowship that year (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)).

Shutdown, pause, and the 2024 dissolution filing

Vance shuttered the 501(c)(4) nonprofit in 2021 and put the foundation on hold in May 2022, shortly after clinching Ohio’s Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). His campaign then described the pause as a “temporary hold” during the Senate run against Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan — even as Vance listed himself on a 2022 financial disclosure as “honorary chairman” of the canceled organization (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). Longtime Ohio political observer Herb Asher, an emeritus political science professor at Ohio State University, cast the charity’s shortcomings as “a betrayal,” telling AP: “A person forms a charity presumably to do good things, so when it doesn’t, for whatever reason, that really is a betrayal” (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)).

The story’s final chapter came quietly. In April 2024, the foundation filed paperwork reinstating the corporate status it had allowed to expire in 2022 (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). Trump-Vance campaign spokesperson Taylor Van Kirk told AP the filing was required because the foundation still had money in its bank account and “did not signal that Vance intended to resume the foundation’s efforts” (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)). State records obtained by AP through a public-records request showed about $11,000 remaining in the foundation’s account, which Vance planned to distribute to causes benefiting Appalachia (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)).

The episode followed Vance into his larger political arc. In April 2024, as a senator, he voted against the FEND Off Fentanyl Act — a bill he had cosponsored with Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown — because it was tied to funding for Ukraine (Inside Philanthropy). By August 2024, when the dissolution filing surfaced, Vance was days away from becoming the Republican vice-presidential nominee (Associated Press (via The Ironton Tribune)).

What this profile does not claim

• It does not resolve which of the AP’s two founding-date framings is exact — “a day after the 2016 presidential election” versus “not long after Hillbilly Elegy was published in 2016” — so it states only 2016.
• It does not claim the planned 2024 dissolution or the $11,000 distribution actually took place; only the campaign’s stated plan was reported in August 2024.
• It does not name the organizer whose cancer diagnosis AP cited, since AP did not.
• It does not explain the foundation’s accounting discrepancies, which Vance’s own advisers could not explain.
• It does not endorse characterizations of the group as a “scam” or as purely political; it reports the verified fundraising, spending, and program facts and the criticism as criticism.