When you donate to a charity, you would expect the money to go towards an organization, right?
The Open Hand foundation is a charity which YouTuber Jirard Khalil, known by his channel name The Completionist, and his family started up ever since his mother passed away from dementia in order to raise funds for research combating the disease. Despite being known as the ‘Open Hand’ foundation, two other YouTubers investigated what the charity was hiding from their audience.
Jirard Khalil, AKA The Completionist. Credit: P. Lehman/Future Publishing via Getty Image
YouTubers Karl Jobst, an investigative journalist mainly focusing on cheating and fraud in the video game community; and SomeOrdinaryGamers (SOG), who does deep dives on anything internet culture related, teamed up to investigate how the charity used the money they raised from their annual live-stream charity events over their many years of being active. By looking over their publicly available tax files, Jobst and SOG found something alarming.
Since 2014, the Open Hand Foundation had raised over US$650,000, but majority of the money is just sitting in a bank account and not a single dollar had been donated. Some of the money appears to be in use, however, as every year they deduce a couple thousand dollars for “other expenses.”
SomeOrdinaryGamers going over The Open Hand Foundation’s 2018 tax filings. Credit: SomeOrdinaryGamers
Jobst reached out to the Open Hand Foundation for answers, where they replied that their reason for holding the money is because they have, “been evaluating potential beneficiaries who align with [their] vision,” adding that, “the importance of careful consideration in our partnerships and is the reason why [they] continue to search for a proper partner and recipient of [their] donations.” Jobst found this statement a bit strange as, for a long time, on the charity’s website they claim to have been working with organizations and institutions such as the University of California San Francisco and the Alzheimer’s Association.
Through an interview with Khalil, Jobst and SOG were told that Khalil only found out that the funds were not moving out back in 2021 and that he himself was surprised that the money was not being put to use as expected, Khalil telling the two, “I assumed that it was all going to a charity and I assumed incorrectly.” Even though it’s apparently been two years since he knew that none of the money was going to any charity (and still hasn’t as of writing), in a 2023 stream, Khalil still claimed that The Open Hand Foundation is contributing to various organizations.
Watch Karl Jobst’s and SomeOrdinaryGamer’s videos about this topic here!
The Completionist’s Charity Has Been Lying To You For Years…
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