In his statement to The Times, Mr Vance said he had donated $80,000 of his own money to the nonprofit group, representing about a third of the $221,000 it reportedly raised over the course of the year. operating time. He declined to identify the group’s other sponsors.
Mr. Vance said he took no salary. He has no formal leadership role but calls himself “honorary president”.
How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times employees can vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or demonstrations to support a movement or raise money for, or raise money for, any political candidate or electoral cause.
“I won’t promise anything now, other than this: I will work hard to find solutions to the opioid and unemployment problems, and when we identify possible solutions, we will. I’ll do something about them,” he wrote to members of his mentorship in 2017. He initialed, “Wishing to do some good, JD.”
Mr. Vance wanted to help grandparents, like him, who had to raise children when parents were absent or unable. The task of figuring out how to do it fell to Jamil Jivani, a friend of Vance’s from Yale Law School who had been hired as the group’s director of law and policy. Jivani and two Ohio State University-paid researchers – where Mr Vance is a “scholar-in-residence” in the political science department – spent months researching family law, looking for possible policies. change.
At the time, Mr. Vance was lecturing, working for an investment firm and dividing his time between Ohio and Washington, where his wife and young son lived. Vance was mostly absent from the nonprofit group’s offices, according to an employee of the organization, who requested anonymity while describing the group’s inner workings. That person usually studies in Mr. Vance’s spacious and often empty office on campus. “It was very quiet,” the person said.
Another person who worked for the nonprofit group said that, in hindsight, it seemed to serve Mr. Vance’s ambitions by giving him a presence in a state where he hadn’t lived full-time in several years. five. The person said it felt as if much of the work involved giving outsiders the impression that Mr. Vance was in the state, said the person, who requested anonymity for fear of offending Mr. Vance and others. his supporters.
In November 2017, the team’s study came up with a result: op-ed in The Cleveland Plain Dealer. In that section, Mr. Vance called on the Ohio Legislature to pass an invoice that would help “relative caretakers” like his grandparents.
