Boston College Introduction
Founded in 1863, Boston College is a Jesuit, Catholic university located six miles from downtown Boston with an enrollment of 9,484 full-time undergraduates and 5,250 graduate and professional students. Ranked 35 among national universities, Boston College has 888 full-time and 1,281 FTE faculty, 2,711 non-faculty employees, an operating budget of $1.4 billion, and an endowment in excess of $3.5 billion.
Job Description
The mission of the Initiative on Land, Housing & Property
Rights (the Initiative) is to address real property issues that impact poor and
disadvantaged communities. Many of the activities the Initiative undertakes
assist disadvantaged communities that have been harmed as a result of lacking
adequate land and housing rights. The Initiative's core activities include
training law students and other students to develop legal and other technical
expertise that can be used by these students when they are in school and after
they graduate to help disadvantaged people and communities address their land
and housing issues; catalyzing both theoretical and applied, policy-relevant
research on various land and housing issues that have been understudied and
undertheorized; proactively working to develop legal reform and policy
solutions to address property problems disadvantaged communities experience;
and sponsoring both continuing legal education programs for lawyers and
community legal education and other outreach programs for disadvantaged
communities. The Initiative hopes to collaborate with other stakeholders in a
true spirit of partnership to more effectively address land and housing issues
that disadvantaged communities experience, specifically communities that are disproportionately
though not exclusively communities of color.
Position Summary
The Estate Planning Fellow for the Initiative will report to
Professor Thomas W. Mitchell, who serves as the Director of the Initiative as
well as to the Senior Associate Director of Operations once that staff person
is hired and comes onboard. The Fellow also will work quite closely and in a
collaborative way with the Special Projects Manager, David Price, the
Initiative's point person for the Harvard University-funded project described
below.
The Estate Planning Fellow will play a leading role in the
Initiative's work under the Homeownership Estate Planning Project (the
Project) funded by the Reparative Partnership Grant Program of the Harvard and
the Legacy of Slavery (H&LS) Initiative. The Project will provide disadvantaged
homeowners and homebuyers in Boston and Cambridge, and elsewhere in
Massachusetts over time, with estate planning classes combined with legal
assistance to create estate plans. This work addresses a critical cause of the
widening of the racial wealth gap: the loss of homeownership due to the
instability of owning a home as heirs' property. Heirs' property often is
created when an ancestor dies without a will or other estate plan and family
members own property collectively as tenants in common, a very unstable and
otherwise problematic form of ownership. It also can come into existence when a
property owner dies with a simple will that replicates what would occur if they
died without some type of estate plan in place. According to one study, 24% of
Black adults and 19% of Latino adults have a will compared to 64% of white
adults.
Duties include:
Project Management (10%)
• Convene regular meetings of partners to review the work plan, agree on action items with assignments to individuals, track the progress of the Project, identify any problems in meeting the startup or implementation timeline and goals, and ensure that solutions are generated quickly. The Project coordination meetings will be more frequent during the initial months of the grant period.
• Communicate with the H&LS funding team including submission of required reports.
• Network with some other estate planning and homeowner counseling initiatives in the United States - governmental, nonprofit, and for profit - that are designed to help disadvantaged people to help ensure the Initiative's work under the Harvard grant is performed consistent with best practices and to the highest level possible.
• Document results of the Project including: numbers and demographics of participants completing estate planning classes, results of participant surveys, views of online legal resources, the Project's curriculum planning process, and proposals for adoption of the curriculum by others.
• Promote internship and externship opportunities for law students to help develop a pipeline of prospective estate planning and public interest attorneys and future pro bono law firm volunteers.
Communications and Marketing to Target
Communities (15%)
• Conduct startup and ongoing communications with community stakeholders using information meetings, marketing presentations, tabling, speaking at various gatherings as an invited speaker or otherwise, stakeholder n
Location: Newton, MA
Posted: Oct. 25, 2024, 6:47 p.m.
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