Join a powerful room of community leaders, funders, strategists, non-profit executives, organizers and families navigating the largest wealth transfer in American history. 

Over the next decade, an estimated $124 trillion will change hands through the largest wealth transfer in history. For Black families across the South, that transfer is at risk before it begins – as our wealth is concentrated in areas where the law least protects it. Across nine Southern states, Black Southern elders hold $852 billion in wealth and assets – yet more than half of it lacks an estate plan. Absent wills or trust, this wealth cannot be protected nor directed to where it should go. 

This divide is a product of how the rules of inheritance are written. Together, we must rewrite those rules. 

On October 21, 2025, Kindred Futures will host the Held in Trust Symposium, a strategic exchange exploring the latest research for preserving and transferring Black wealth through state-level protections. 

Held in Trust: A Policy Agenda for Black Inheritance moves beyond presenting findings to survey strategic levers, name the rules that put Black inheritance at risk, identify players with the power to change them, confront limited beliefs preventing coordinated action, and coordinate our collective strategy to chart a new game. 

During this working convening, we invite participants to shift from personal agency to collective action. Activations, programming and experiences will invite inquiry questions of: 

• What do I hold? What can I prepare, document, protect or put in motion? 
• What has our family built? What must be preserved and documented to be successfully transferred? 

• What changes when we see our outcomes as truly connected? How do we move beyond the considerations of our private household to the broader community? 

• What can we protect, build or change together that no family can secure alone? 

• What laws, systems and institutions must change so that Black wealth can endure? 

• How soon must we collectively act? 

Whether our kin receives the transfers we intend to give depends on state policy choices that will either narrow the racial wealth gap, or widen it. 

Black Southern families already hold substantial wealth: homes, land, businesses – all worth protecting, transferring to future generations and growing in perpetuity. Held in Trust: A Policy Agenda for Black Inheritance identifies the state-level policy levers needed to ensure these transfers happen – at scale, with ease and in sufficient time. 

Join us in interrogating the policies governing Black wealth while building the collective strategies required to rewrite the rules.