The Future of JD Vance’s Charity in Ohio Is Unclear

A tiny nonprofit founded by Trump’s running mate to improve the lives of Ohioans suffering from opioid addiction remains in limbo.

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Senator JD Vance is supposed to be closing down a tiny, dormant charity he founded in 2017.

So far, he has not.

Last month, Donald J. Trump’s campaign told The Associated Press that Mr. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, was preparing to close Our Ohio Renewal Foundation and give its remaining money to causes “benefiting Appalachia.”

This week, Ohio officials said no one has yet filed the paperwork to close Mr. Vance’s foundation, which as of March had just $11,000 in the bank. Mr. Vance is not required to shut down the group, either by nonprofit or campaign law.

Neither the Trump campaign nor the nonprofit’s own accountant responded to questions from The New York Times about the nonprofit’s fate.

That leaves the Our Ohio Renewal Foundation as a kind of charitable time capsule, a frozen remnant of a different time in Mr. Vance’s life.

Mr. Vance founded that group in 2017, when he was known as the author of a best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” and still an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump. After his book’s success, Mr. Vance left his job as a venture capitalist in California and moved back to Ohio. But he rejected rumors that he intended to run for office.

Instead, Mr. Vance said, he had come back to start two nonprofits.

These would battle the issues that had plagued his own family: opioid addiction, joblessness, broken families. In paperwork filed with the I.R.S.’s nonprofit division, the nonprofits said they planned to raise more than $3 million combined, and that they would “make it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams.”

“I never wanted to be a public intellectual or a talking head,” Mr. Vance told the Washington Post in 2017. “I actually care about solving some of these things.”

Neither 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. It raised $220,000: Mr. Vance said he gave $80,000 of that total, personally. But the group was not much of a lobbying force: It produced two op-eds and a pair of tweets. Tax filings show it spent much of its money paying its staff.

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