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YouTuber Jirard (a.k.a. The Completionist) has been accused of keeping and hoarding charity donations (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Clbull@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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Karl Jobst and SomeOrdinaryGamers (separate video linked here) have accused Jirard Khalil of lying to viewers about his charity.

Jirard is a YouTuber who runs a channel known as the Completionist, where he plays games to 100% completion and reviews them based on how enjoyable the experience was.

The Open Hand Foundation, which was co-founded by Jirard in 2014, was set up to raise money for dementia charities after his dementia-stricken mother passed away. However, their yearly filings with the IRS suggest that none of this money has been donated to charity.

Jacque (Jirard's brother) responded to Karl's emails to the Open Hand Foundation claiming that they are still searching for the correct charity to partner with and disburse these funds, whereas Jirard claimed that he was only aware that none of the funds had gone out last year, yet is still openly promoting Open Hand on stream and claiming they support the UCSF, Alzheimer's Association, the AFTD and many other charities.

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[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago

I'm certain he's very busy. He's busy with his channel, and he was also one of the cast of G4 for the short time it returned, and they were being overworked I think there, and he was still running his channel. This is why you hire people to handle these things though. It's bad that it wasn't handled properly, but not necessarily malicious. I'll forgive a mistake, but if it turns out it was a scam that's unforgivable.

[-] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Based on the reported expenses being around $10,000 a yea; I don't think they were trying to run a scam or trying to be malicious. I think they wanted to honor their mom, but didn't have the time to run the charity or donation volume to justify hiring someone to run it. Not an excuse for how they ran things of course, I think it wasn't fair to the people who gave them money that they solicited donations on how they wanted things to be rather than how they actually ran it. Whether they knew or not that the money was just sitting there isn't an excuse. If they were soliciting donations then they have a duty to inform themselves.