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 networking, and other methods.
Develop an online state-specific legal toolkit intended to be a permanent resource about heirs’ property and estate planning for homebuyers, homeowners, and homeownership education instructors and counselors.
Share with stakeholders and the public the goals, services, process, and results of the Project using presentations, press releases, blog posts, social media, compelling stories of program participants, annual reports, and a
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Posted: Sept. 2, 2024, 8:25 a.m.
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