HPRC's mission is to develop and facilitate the collaborative action of organizations that help low-income families, particularly families of color in the southeast, retain their ancestral land and maintain it as a sustainable asset for future generations.  To this end, we connect such organizations and partners to legal and land planning resources inside and outside the Coalition, develop and centralize practice materials and research libraries, provide for intra-Coalition case referrals, organize the gathering of empirical information about the scope of heirs' property and land loss, and engage in legal reform efforts on the state and national level.

HPRC News

• The Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act has been enacted in Nevada and Georgia! It also has been listed as suggested state legislation by the Council of State Governments.

• HPRC members have conducted or will be conducting a number of presentations, including:

  • A Wills for Farmers Clinic on February 25th, 2012, hosted by the Conservation Trust for North Carolina in conjunction with NC Central University School of Law at the Minority Landowners Conference in Raleigh, NC.  The project is modeled after the Wills for Heroes Program and will offer farmers essential legal documents including wills, living wills, and power of attorney.
  • The ABA Midyear meeting in Atlanta on February 2, 2011. Sponsored by the ABA Commission on Homelessness and Poverty, the Section of State and Local Government Law, and the Uniform Law Commission, this presentation was entitled What Costs Billions, and is Worthless? Heir property in America and African-American Land Loss. The panel featured Shirley Sherrod and American Planning Association President Mitch Silver, as well as HPRC members Craig Baab (Alabama Appleseed Center and National Appleseed Heir Property Project Director), Thomas Mitchell (University of Wisconsin, and Reporter for the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act), and Chrystal Chastain-Baker (Georgia Appleseed).
  • The American Planning Association annual meeting in Boston on April 11, 2011. This panel featured presentations by HPRC members Greg Peterson (private attorney) and Craig Baab, as well as Jeffrey May (National Community Reinvestment Coalition).
  • The Alabama State Bar Annual Meeting on July 14 or 15 in Grand Hotel, Alabama. This was a panel discussion on heirs property with Bob McCurley (Executive Director of the Alabama Law Institute and Chair of the Uniform Act's drafting committee), Prof. Robert Zabawa (Tuskegee University), and Craig H. Baab.
  • The ABA annual meeting in Toronto in August 2011. This heirs property panel was sponsored by the ABA Section of State & Local government Law. Thomas Mitchell was one of the presenters.
• HPRC's work on the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act has been successful, as NCCUSL unanimously voted on July 15, 2010 to accept the final draft, and the ABA has adopted the Act as well. Check out the Uniform Law Commission's web page devoted to the Act, which has links to docs related to the Act and shows which states are considering enactment.

• HPRC's Resource Center has now accepted 6 cases!

• In August 2009, Andrew Sachs of the Dispute Settlement Center of Carrboro, North Carolina, conducted a free training for HPRC members on the facilitation of large group discussions. Mark Morris of the North Carolina Central University School of Law served as a liaison between the Resource Center and the Dispute Settlement Center, and the school hosted the event on its campus in Durham, North Carolina.

• Read about HPRC's successful work with the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program on a 150-acre property in North Carolina.

• The ABA Journal recently released a feature story on heirs' property that featured many members of HPRC.

• Two HPRC members (the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and the Center for Heirs' Property Preservation) have been awarded grants under the USDA's latest Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) for heirs' property.

• The drafting committee of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) will be meeting in Chicago in March to complete the last draft of the Uniform Partition of Heirs' Property Act! HPRC contributed significant input to the proposal submitted to NCCUSL by the ABA's Property Preservation Task Force, and HPRC members have served as Observers throughout the drafting process. Read more about this in our "HPRC Projects" section.

• The new HPRC Resource Center accepted its first four cases for handling this winter! Read more about the Resource Center in our "HPRC Projects" section.

• HPRC is grateful to Alison Volk, Nadya Perez-Reyes, and Charlie Doughty of the University of Wisconsin Law School for their work putting together a legal information brochure for heirs' property in North Carolina. HPRC also thanks Professor Thomas Mitchell for bringing his students into the project.