A progressive organization that says it was raided by the FBI is a little-known but integral player in progressive politics in Ohio.
The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is a nonpartisan organization, but works closely with Democrats on issues like voter registration, political organizing and ballot-issue campaigns.
The group was founded in 2007 and has since grown to be one of the most well-funded political organizing operations in the state. The OOC and its political arm, the Ohio Organizing Campaign, together received nearly $55 million from 2020-2024, according to the organizations’ public tax filings for the most recent years available.
Its fundraising goes up and down with election cycles and reached its highest level on record in 2024, when both OOC entities brought in a combined $20.9 million.
The organizations spent nearly $42.9 million during that time.
Prentiss Haney, a leader with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, didn’t return messages from Signal Statewide. But he told the Statehouse News Bureau that FBI agents came to the organization’s Northeast Ohio offices on Thursday, searching and sometimes taking electronic devices and laptops.
People the FBI talked with described the investigation as related to voter fraud, Haney said. Spokespeople for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Northern Ohio and the FBI field office in Cleveland haven’t responded to messages.
MS Now first reported the raid.
The investigation arrives in the middle of a politically charged year for voting in Ohio. Polls show competitive races for U.S. Senate and governor, and Democrats are hoping for their first statewide win since 2018. It also comes as the Trump administration has opened election fraud inquiries in several states, including Georgia and Michigan.
What does the Ohio Organizing Collaborative do?
The organization describes itself as building “transformative relational power with everyday Ohioans for statewide social, racial and economic justice.”
While publicly-available tax filings only offer broad categories of its spending, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative is involved in voter registration drives and political organizing, with affiliates that specifically target Black churches, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their families, women and college students.
It has also gotten involved with redistricting, the process of redrawing state legislative and congressional lines. In 2021, it partnered with the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal elections law center, to sue the Republican-controlled Ohio state government over state legislative district maps.
The Brennan Center issued a statement about the FBI raids, calling it in part “an egregious abuse of law enforcement for political ends, and it fits a pattern of federal inquiries targeting voting infrastructure ahead of the midterm elections.”
In recent years, the Ohio Organizing Collaborative has served as a financial hub for other progressive state organizations, tax filings show. In 2023 and 2024, the OOC gave almost $1.2 million to groups like the Ohio Environmental Council, an environmental group, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a Black civil-rights organization whose leader holds a top position with the Ohio Democratic Party, Policy Matters Ohio, a liberal think tank, and Innovation Ohio, a liberal advocacy group.
The OOC has also been involved in ballot issues, both at the local and state levels.
In 2021, the OOC backed a successful Cleveland charter amendment to create a community police commission, and supported a failed Cleveland amendment to create a process to allow citizens to provide input to drafting the city budget.
It gave $250,000 to the August 2023 campaign to defeat Issue 1, a Republican effort to block an abortion-rights amendment that voters approved the following November. It also gave $300,000 to the campaign backing the redistricting-reform amendment that voters rejected in November 2024.
And most recently, the OOC pushed to revive a ballot issue that would expand state voting access laws via a state constitutional amendment. The group got permission from a state panel to begin collecting voter signatures in November 2024, but there haven’t been signs of an active campaign to actually qualify for the ballot
Who funds the Ohio Organizing Collaborative?
As a nonprofit organization, the OOC is not required to disclose its donors.
But Signal Statewide reviewed dozens of public tax filings from large foundations that reveal donations to the OOC.
One is the Gund Foundation, which reported giving the Ohio Organizing Collaborative about $800,000 from 2021-2024 for voter engagement efforts and to conduct a poll for the viability of a childcare tax levy.
But most of the money OOC gets comes from a network of left-leaning foundations that fund political organizing and politics across the country.
These include the Tides Foundation, the Open Society Policy Center and the Foundation to Promote Open Society – both are connected to liberal billionaire George Soros – and the Ford Foundation and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Some of the OOC’s large donors are dark-money groups that also contributed to the failed 2024 redistricting amendment, including the New Venture Fund, America Votes and the Sixteen Thirty Fund.
The Ohio Organizing Collaborative hasn’t gotten in legal trouble as an organization, although a paid canvasser in 2017 pleaded guilty to voter fraud charges, in part for falsifying signatures on voter registration forms.
Democratic politicians blast FBI raid
Reports of the raid drew a swift round condemnation from many prominent state Democratic politicians, including U.S. Rep. Shontel Brown of Cleveland, governor candidate Amy Acton, U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown, Secretary of State candidate Allison Russo and Ohio Democratic Party Chair Kathleen Clyde. They all said Ohioans should feel safe registering to vote in November.
Acton issued a statement saying she is “deeply troubled” by the raid. Brown called the raids “deeply disturbing” and “a transparent attempt at silencing Ohioans and their ability to vote in free and fair elections.”
“The FBI should immediately make public any and all activities around these raids in Ohio. For years, Ohio has had safe and secure elections that have been administered in a bipartisan fashion. Any attempt to intimidate Ohio voters is wrong, and will not work,” Brown said.
