Non Technical Summary
Saving the Family Property: Heirs' Property Prevention, Resolution, and Land Use, a two-year project, is structured to connect limited-resource communities throughout Alabama with services and resources to prevent land loss, resolve title issues, and promote generational income production through sustainable land management. The main objectives of the project are to:Reduce instances of land loss in underserved communities by providing access to education and legal services necessary to navigating onerous local, county, and state laws and regulations.Train undergraduate and graduate students to become abstractors who will help underserved and minority families conduct necessary genealogical and title searches.Provide options for families to develop income streams that have the potential for increasing generational wealth.The project will partner with local leaders, legal professionals, families, and collaborators to provide community education focusing on such topics as estate planning, heirs' property education, resolving family conflicts, mediation, conducting genealogical searches, title searches, and land use strategies for income generation. The provision of access to customized legal services is an innovation since it addresses a major barrier to resolving heirs' property cases and helps reduce intergenerational family disputes. Programming will occur around the state with an initial concentration in Alabama's Black Belt region and counties with a higher prevalence of heirs' property. This initiative will collaborate with Faulkner University's Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, which provides pro bono legal assistance via estate planning, ancestral property, and mediation clinics.

Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)	Subject of Investigation (SOI)	Field of Science (FOS)	Percent
801	6020	3030	10%
903	6099	3020	50%
123	0199	3030	10%
802	6020	3030	10%
605	0199	3020	10%
131	6030	3020	10%

Knowledge Area
605 - Natural Resource and Environmental Economics; 801 - Individual and Family Resource Management; 903 - Communication, Education, and Information Delivery; 123 - Management and Sustainability of Forest Resources; 802 - Human Development and Family Well-Being; 131 - Alternative Uses of Land;

Subject Of Investigation
6020 - The family and its members; 6099 - People and communities, general/other; 0199 - Soil and land, general; 6030 - The farm as an enterprise;

Field Of Science
3020 - Education; 3030 - Information and communication;

Goals / Objectives
The statewide programmatic reach of Saving the Family Property: Heirs' Property Prevention, Resolution, and Land Use will operate to accomplish the following objectives:Project Objectives:1.Strengthen Cooperative Extension's expertise in and delivery of education related to problems stemming from inadequate estate planning and development of heirs' property.2. Increase individual knowledge of advance planning by disseminating education on estate planning.3. Host pro bono Elder Law community clinics in legal deserts to make estate planning accessible and affordable to low-income, limited-resources individuals and families.4. Increase participants' knowledge of heirs' property by widely disseminating education on the implications of creating heirs' property.5. Equip families with tools to collaboratively resolve clouded property titles.6. Engage undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at Alabama A&M University to conduct genealogy searches and title abstraction services at no cost to program participants.7. Host pro bono heirs' property clinics to provide accessibility and affordability to low-income, limited-resources individuals and families and regions deemed legal deserts or having higher rates of heirs' property cases.8. Increase landowners' awareness of potential uses of family property that can result in income generation and subsequent generational wealth.9. Develop a database of diverse legal, business, agriculture, and community partners for program sustainability.10. Expand Alabama Extension at Alabama A&M University's footprint in rural and underserved areas.11. Recruitundergraduate and graduate students at Alabama A&M University and graduate students enrolled in Faulkner University's law school to provide services to program participants in alignment with events, programmatic series, and clinics.12. Increase skills of undergraduate and graduate students through trainings and experiential learning experiences.

Project Methods
Saving the Family Property: Heirs' Property Prevention, Resolution, and Land Use will enhance and expand previous programmatic efforts of Alabama Cooperative Extension System (ACES) to disseminate education on estate planning and heirs' property. The principal investigator will oversee every aspect of this project and coordinate with collaborating partners on facilitation of educational events and mobile community clinics.Virginia Caples Lifelong Learning Institute (VCLLI) has conducted a virtual workshop series on estate planning and a second series on heirs' property. The principal investigator and co-principal investigator have completed curriculum training for Understanding Heirs' Property at the Community Level: Overview, Prevention, and Resolution. By collaborating with existing partners, program plans can begin soon after grant startup and orientation is complete.In Year One's first quarter of the funding cycle, grant-funded personnel will be hired, and a small planning team will be assembled to solidify an operation schedule and identify essential collaborators to invite to assist with project execution. During this organization phase, additional presenters will be invited to be trained in the Understanding Heirs Property at the Community Level: Overview, Prevention and Resolution curriculum. Implementation sites for initial program delivery will be determined by needs assessment, requests from County Extension Coordinators through the annual ACES Plan of Work process, and findings of current research. County level planning teams, comprised of local leaders and residents, will be recruited to facilitate community-level logistics including securing meeting space, effective marketing, and appropriate approach to implement program components. The project's program team, specifically the principal investigator and program assistants, will engage community teams regularly during implementation in their respective county/region and for post-implementation evaluation and reporting. County and regional estate planning and heirs' property education sessions will be presented beginning in the second quarter. Subsequent pro bono mobile clinics will be held to provide opportunities for the application of knowledge learned. Information sessions on land use and management practices will both be incorporated into community events and offered as standalone workshops that include production agriculture and/or related tours. Virtual workshop series will be added to the VCLLI course offerings.Students and faculty in Faulkner's GAP Clinic will participate in a Spring Break Public Service Trip to Alabama's Black Belt counties to provide students with on-the-ground experience in the provision of legal services to rural communities, particularly in the areas of heirs' property and estate planning. Secondarily, this mission trip will provide pro bono civil and legal assistance to residents of rural and traditionally disadvantaged populations in Alabama's central "Black Belt" region.To disseminate education more widely, workshops and mobile clinics will be integrated into the Successful Aging Initiative conferences held in five Alabama Extension at AAMU Urban Centers (Mobile, Montgomery, Anniston, Florence, and Huntsville; reaching 13 counties). The Successful Aging Initiative, referred to as SAI, is a one-day event designed to address the needs and concerns of older adults. Information and resources presented are designed to help older adults make informed decisions, maintain independence, play active roles in society, and improve the quality of life for themselves and their families. Print resources to help individuals effectively communicate with families, resolve family conflicts, organize important papers, discuss estate plans, and understand heirs' property and resolution strategies will be distributed at education events. Publications include but are not limited to an ACES Estate Planning Basics: A Guide to Life's Organization, an ACES Heirs Property in Alabama booklet, and a Farmland Access Legal Toolkit's HEIRS' PROPERTY: Understanding the Legal Issues in Alabama. Audiences will be provided with a pre-training survey to obtain baseline data to help the program team understand participants' prior basic knowledge and the challenges they face that the training will hopefully address.Participants will receive a post-session evaluation and later a post-delayed evaluation to capture data on how knowledge gained was put to use and their progress towards achieving clear title, implementation of income-generating land use strategies, and other expected outcomes. Results, outputs, and outcomes will be reported on the USDA/NIFA reporting schedule as well as through Extension publications, conferences and other events. Evaluation PlanEvaluation for this project will include multiple phases and varied assessments. Qualitative and quantitative methods will be used to ascertain participant pre-training knowledge and post-training knowledge gain, anticipated and actual behavior change, actions taken during and after the program, program effectiveness, and perceived value of the experience.Evaluation Framework Quantitative measures will describe program outputs, such as the number of participants reached, knowledge gained, behavior changes, expansion in geographic and demographic reach, and other variables. Surveys distributed will be pre-, post, and delayed post assessments. A pre-survey, the formative evaluation, will assess specific program activities such as whether participating individuals have an estate plan, the extent of their understanding of each advance planning document, plans of action for developing an estate plan, current property ownership status, and knowledge of potential land uses. A survey evaluating these measures will be administered, digitally and/or printed, prior to educational sessions. A post-session evaluation will be immediately administered at the conclusion of education sessions, curriculum series, and conferences. This evaluation will include questions to determine the actions participants plan to take because of the training/experience and knowledge gained. Three months following the educational sessions, participants will receive an online delayed post-survey to learn of actions taken by participants and to determine resources needed to propel them to their intended goal. At the conclusion of Year 1, the principal investigator will conduct check-ins with families who begin title resolution, during this project, through Faulkner University Jones School of Law GAP clinic.Qualitative results will be determined by interviews with co-owners and family members during the process of clearing property titles. Interviews with heirs' property co-owners will provide practitioners and Cooperative Extension with an understanding of the family history, sentimental affects, and intended use of land parcels.Evaluation Management Plan: All evaluation data will be collected by authorized members of the project implementation team and stored securely in locked documents storage containers, for all print copies. Online evaluations will be distributed via email link and/or QR code and data are captured using the Qualtrics software. Evaluation hardcopies will be input into Qualtrics for analysis and consolidation with online submissions. Recordings will also be stored in a separate OneDrive folder accompanied by ACES media releases. Reports downloaded from Qualtrics will be stored in a protected OneDrive file.?