Philly’s Will Power Program helps low-income Black homeowners prepare their wills

Since 2022, Philadelphia’s Will Power Program has connected residents like 72-year-old Vendetta Stephens to the city’s Community Legal Services (CLS) through local community partners like Stephens’ church, which initially set her on the path to connecting with the program that provided her and other low-income Philadelphians with free estate planning services.

According to WHYthe program has so far helped some 1,000 residents of the City of Brotherly Love to draw up wills and other end-of-life documents. According to Stephens, the experience changed the way she used to understand the idea of ​​a will.

“I always said, ‘Wills are for rich people. What should I leave behind?’ But really, I left something to all of them – just from that one house,” Stephens noted. “If I leave something to everyone, and it’s in writing, there’s nothing left to argue about.”

At an event celebrating the program on October 15, held at Zion Baptist Church in North Philadelphia, Debby Freedman, CLS executive director, said the program’s success is a “gigantic achievement.”

Freeman continued, “We want to help stabilize neighborhoods and families, build and sustain intergenerational wealth, and in many cases help close the racial wealth gap in our city.”

Indeed, like CNBC In 2022, it was reported that more than 70% of Black Americans do not have a will, which Brickson Diamond, the co-founder of the nonprofit Black House Foundation, which aims to create new opportunities for Black Americans in the film industry, means Black people are thus left out of one of the most effective ways to transfer wealth in America.

“So many families are losing access to their families and ownership of land,” he noted. “So if you’re not willing to pay the taxes and cover the mortgage … the house will at best fall into disrepair and at worst fall out of the family’s hands.”

That scenario is exactly what Philadelphia’s program wanted to fix, and all that WHY reports that over the life of the city program, the program has primarily helped older Black residents earning less than $60,000; the median income in Philly.

Additionally, a problem specific to Philadelphia is the issue of what is called confused title, which essentially means that it is legally unclear that a relative of a deceased person living in the deceased relative’s former home owns the property because their name is not on the deed.

Also known as heirs, especially in the South, with a confused title, there is often no legally established connection to the home for a descendant of a deceased person. This can therefore lead to a lengthy and expensive process of clarifying title or ownership claims, with the result that a property is also opened to the risk of deterioration, foreclosure and theft of property, which can lead to the loss of a family’s generational wealth.

In June the Center for heirsa national organization dedicated to providing solutions-oriented support to heirs’ property owners, has revamped its website in conjunction with the launch of a new initiative, the East Texas Heirs’ Property Initiative, which was noted in a press release as an “ambitious expansion that brings the organization’s vital services to more families across the South.”

According to the press release, since its founding in 2005, the center has provided 5,842 clients with free legal advice and counsel, approved 412 titles with a combined tax value of $30.1 million, provided education and technical assistance to more than 650 families who own and manage 40,000 acres of land, and secured $11 million for the center’s support partners in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky. Mississippi and West Virginia.

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