Boston College Seeks To Hire An Estate Planning Fellow

Boston College, Estate Planning Fellow:  

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. ... 

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