YPC Heir Property Volunteer Opportunities
The Young Professionals Council of Georgia Appleseed has adopted Heir Property as its signature project. The YPC, along with Crystal Chastain Baker, received the Cousins Public Interest Fellowship at UGA School of Law to study Heir Property in Georgia. Currently the project is in its first year of a two year grant.
The work of the YPC to date includes research into Georgia property and estate laws to develop educational materials to present to landowners and attorney volunteers. The landowner manual went into print on May 1, 2009 and will also be available online. The manual is a collaborative effort of YPC members, the Cousins Fellow, Georgia Appleseed, and DLA Piper pro bono attorneys. The attorney training manual is currently being developed by YPC and pro bono volunteers at DLA Piper.
Volunteers are also working on documenting the prevalence of Heir Property in Georgia through case studies and tax database research. The YPC and Fellow have been in contact with 3 Georgia families, and one has agreed to be a pilot case study. This particular family has 75 potential heirs for a 20 acre plot of land. The property has been passed as Heir Property for 4 generations. YPC is working with this family to collect data and create a model for future use with other families.
The YPC and Fellow have also begun tax database research to find indicators of Heir Property which can be used as a beginning block in assessing the presence of Heir Property. The research is conducted online using the Georgia Tax Assessor Portal – a public website. Most of Georgia’s 159 counties provide online access free of charge to the public tax records. These records provide vital information such as last recorded conveyances, property values, and current tax payer information. An instruction sheet has been created for assisting volunteers in looking for certain key factors that may indicate Heir Property. Current volunteers are searching in 3 Georgia Counties: Clarke, Greene and Hancock. The database search is done by alphabetical letter with each letter taking approximately ten hours to research.
Volunteer opportunities
Tax database research is an area of great need. It can be done from any location as this research is online. Once this research is complete, volunteers will be needed to perform title searches on parcels where indicators were found to determine if the particular parcel is indeed Heir Property.
Volunteers will be needed to assist in developing case studies. This will involve interviewing families and compiling data such as family trees, family addresses, real estate deeds held by family members, etc. Volunteers will also be needed to attend attorney training seminars. Once trained these volunteers can serve two purposes: 1) act as trainers for future seminars; and/or 2) volunteer to assist families with Heir Property to clear title and access property.
Georgia Appleseed and YPC are looking to the Atlanta Bar first as this area has the biggest concentration of attorneys in the state and also because many attorneys in this area have ties to some of the more rural parts of the state where pro bono volunteers might not be available. Anyone interested in volunteering or possibly having their firm involved on a pro bono level may contact Georgia Appleseed or the Cousins Fellow at UGA School of Law:
Sharon Hill, Executive, Executive Director, Georgia Appleseed
Direct: 404-815-5903 | Main: 404-685-6750 | shill@gaappleseed.org
Crystal Chastain Baker, Cousins Fellow, UGA School of Law
706-542-5213 | ccbaker@uga.edu
