Wright Foundation now approved SC charity, next step includes becoming tax exempt with IRS

The Josephine Wright Foundation registered as a charitable organization with the South Carolina Secretary of State Wednesday, establishing itself as a charity eight months after it was founded and committing to the state’s financial monitoring.

As a registered charity, the Hilton Head based foundation must submit annual financial reports to the Secretary of State’s office, which is responsible for oversight of all charitable organizations operating in the state. The first report is due August 2024, and the office removed the foundation from its list of suspended charities.

The Josephine Wright Foundation isn’t Internal Revenue Service tax-exempt, according to the registration form provided to The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette by spokesperson Shannon Wiley. It also doesn’t appear in the IRS tax exempt organization search. This means that as it stands hundreds who have donated to the GoFundMe, totaling $367,809 as of Friday and including celebrities such as Kyrie Irving and Snoop Dogg, aren’t able apply donations to their income taxes.

Wright’s granddaughter, Charise Graves, first mentioned the foundation on a GoFundMe page on August 11, 2023, saying that it will aid other “Josephine Wrights” in preserving property. Wright fought against developers on Hilton Head to retain Gullah land that had been in her husband’s family since before the Civil War. She garnered national attention in the last year of her life before dying at 94 in January.

Wright family spokesperson Altimese Nichole said last week that while the family figures out specifics she doesn’t want people to lose sight of the foundation’s mission.

“The family commitment is to help other people because of what happened to their grandma,” she said. “I don’t want us to lose sight of that.”

Neither Wiley nor Nichole were immediately available for comment Friday morning.