In his statement to The Times, Mr Vance said he donated $80,000 of his own money to the non-profit group, about a third of the $221,000 he said he raised over the course of his life. He declined to identify other donors to the group.
Mr. Vance said he did not receive a salary. He had no formal leadership role, but called himself “Honorary President”.
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“I am not promising anything at this time other than this: I will work hard to find solutions to the opioid and unemployment issues, and when we identify viable solutions, we will do something about them,” he said. – he writes to the members of his advisory committee. board in 2017. He signed, “I look forward to doing good, JD.
Mr. Vance wanted to help grandparents, like his own, who stepped in to raise children when parents were absent or incapacitated. The task of figuring out how to proceed fell to Jamil Jivani, a friend of Vance’s from Yale Law School who had been hired as the group’s legal and policy director. Mr. Jivani and two researchers paid by Ohio State University – where Mr. Vance was a “researcher in residence” in the political science department – spent months researching family law, looking for policies subject to change.
At the time, Mr. Vance was traveling for speeches, working for an investment firm and dividing his time between Ohio and Washington, where his wife and young son lived. Mr. Vance was largely absent from the offices of the nonprofit group, according to an employee of the organization, who asked not to be identified while describing the inner workings of the group. The person often studied in Mr. Vance’s spacious and often empty office on campus. “It was very quiet,” the person said.
Another person who worked for the non-profit group said that, in retrospect, it seemed to be aimed at serving Mr Vance’s ambition by giving him a presence in a state where he had not lived full time since. several years. The person said they felt a big part of the job was to give strangers the impression that Mr. Vance was in the state, said the person, who asked not to be identified for fear of upsetting Mr. Vance and his supporters.
In November 2017, the group’s research yielded one result: an op-ed in The Cleveland Plain Dealer. In the article, Mr Vance urged the Ohio legislature to pass a bill that would help “caregiver parents” like his grandparents.