Promises to Fix “Social Ills”
After Hillbilly Elegy turned him into a public figure, JD Vance promised to tackle the very problems his book described: addiction, broken families, and economic decline. In 2016, as he prepared to move back to Ohio, he floated the idea of a nonprofit or even a political run.
Soon after, he launched Our Ohio Renewal, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization focused on education, addiction, and other “social ills.” On paper, it assembled a serious advisory board: academics and policy thinkers like Keith Humphreys, Jamil Jivani, Yuval Levin, and Sally Satel.
A Charity Under the Microscope
In practice, Our Ohio Renewal struggled. It raised about $221,000 in 2017—$80,000 from Vance himself—but spent heavily on overhead and travel. More than $63,000 went to “management services” for its executive director, Jai Chabria, who later became Vance’s chief campaign strategist.
Critics seized on this overlap. During the 2022 Senate race, Democrat Tim Ryan accused the group of being a political front, pointing to its payments to a Vance adviser and its use of public opinion polling while failing to deliver meaningful anti-addiction programs. Vance denied it was a sham, but by 2021, the organization had quietly shut down.
A sister entity, the Our Ohio Renewal Foundation, raised about $69,000 between 2017 and 2023 and had not spent any funds since 2019.
One of the charity’s few visible achievements—a yearlong residency in Appalachian Ohio by psychiatrist Sally Satel—was later described by the Associated Press and ProPublica as “tainted” by links among Satel, her employer the American Enterprise Institute, and opioid maker Purdue Pharma. Satel denied any relationship with Purdue or knowledge of its donations.
AppHarvest: High-Tech Hope, Harsh Reality
Vance’s private-sector bet on revival centered on AppHarvest, an indoor vertical farming startup in Kentucky. As a board member from 2017 to 2021 and an investor through Narya Capital, he championed the company as a model for bringing good jobs with benefits to a struggling region.
Reality was rougher. AppHarvest accumulated over $340 million in debt and declared bankruptcy in 2023. Workers complained of “brutal” conditions inside the greenhouses. Many local employees quit and were replaced by migrant contract laborers, eventually making up more than half the workforce. Vance’s campaign later said he had no operational role and was unaware of these conditions, noting that migrant hiring decisions were made after he left the board.
Takeaway
Through Our Ohio Renewal and AppHarvest, Vance tried to fuse philanthropy, investment, and politics into a story of regional redemption. Instead, both ventures exposed how easily the language of revival can mask fragile business models, thin program results, and the steady pull of political ambition.