Highlighting the work of the Community Development Law Clinic
By Jess Clarke
Ed Cockrell had a real challenge in 2022: to preserve the cemetery and grounds at Bethlehem Presbyterian Church in Mebane, North Carolina, given a precipitous decline in membership there, where he is treasurer.
How to figure out the options, what questions to ask, and finding the best ways to navigate the legal nuances aren’t issues that non-lawyers typically know how to approach. Cockrell’s solution? UNC School of Law.
He contacted Dean Martin H. Brinkley ’92, who suggested he consider exploring the possibility of a nonprofit and referred him to the school’s Community Development Law (CDL) Clinic for possible assistance.
Seven months later, by November 2022, two 3Ls (now graduates) with the CDL Clinic had led Cockrell and other church members in establishing a nonprofit to protect the historic church and cemetery and make the grounds a resource for other nonprofits. The students also researched legal issues related to property ownership and the church’s merger in the 1980s with the Presbyterian Church USA organization.
Cockrell credits “the indefatigable energy” of Aurora Jaques and Beth Nelson in providing invaluable help to the church to create The House of Bread Project, a nonprofit of which he is president and treasurer. The nonprofit will help secure the future of the cemetery and buildings.
“Both Beth and Aurora will do great work in the field of law because I know they have the energy, knowledge and inquisitiveness necessary to understand legal issues and to chart out successful approaches to addressing complex problems,” Cockrell says.
To grasp the complex problems faced by the church, which dates back 200 years, Jaques and Nelson did legal and historical research on North Carolina law related to cemeteries and land reversions. They also studied federal and state case law pertaining to the rights of individual Presbyterian churches associated with larger organizations such as Presbyterian Church USA.
“Ed and the congregation had a sense that they were facing a complicated set of decisions, but it wasn’t clear exactly what the legal questions and legal tasks would be,” says CDL Clinic Director Tom Kelley. “In consultation with Ed, (Nelson and Jaques) prioritized the legal questions and tasks and set to work.”
Then came the key task of explaining their findings in lay terms to Cockrell and other church members.
Nelson and Jaques were drawn to the project partly by Cockrell’s commitment to and passion for the cause. As students, they brought passion and commitment to their work, too, as they pursued a project with what Kelley calls “an exquisitely complicated set of legal issues.”
For Jaques, their work was “a unique opportunity to walk a client through the legal process from start to finish. I am confident that without clinical experience, I would not have had the opportunity to help an organization run their first organizational meeting so early into my career,” she says.
“The most rewarding part was definitely getting to participate in the organizational meeting establishing their new nonprofit organization. It really felt like we were seeing the work that we’d put in over the semester come to life,” Nelson says.
That part of the project was as gratifying for the students as it was challenging.
She has gained valuable experience through the CDL Clinic that will be useful as she starts her legal career. “After working with the CDL Clinic, I feel more prepared to really dive in and ask questions to get to the heart of a client’s concern early in the process. Working with The House of Bread Project specifically has shown me the power of curiosity as a lawyer, and I’m excited to get to continue to hone that skill in my future practice,” she says.
Her Carolina Law classes provided the foundation she drew on to help the church reach a successful conclusion with the initial phase of the project. She cites classes on property, business associations, contracts and nonprofit organizations as particularly relevant in the work she and Nelson did.
Jaques and Nelson continued to help church members as they chose more people for the nonprofit’s board, determined how to safeguard the buildings, and considered ways to pay for preservation of the cemetery, among other tasks. The board also plans to discuss how to gauge interest in the community for other nonprofits to use the church grounds and structures, and to research approval needed for broader fundraising for The House of Bread Project and other organizations.
An analysis of the church’s ownership that Nelson and Jaques provided for Cockrell’s group will help the nonprofit board as it considers any possible transfers of church property to The House of Bread Project.
The name of Cockrell’s nonprofit has its origin in antiquity. He notes that it was inspired by the original Hebrew meaning of Bethlehem — the church’s name — which some believe translates into Bread House or House of Bread.
Preserving the church grounds, on five acres in Orange County’s historic Oaks Community, will also save threads of the history of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where Cockrell earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
Bethlehem Presbyterian has several other connections to UNC-Chapel Hill, Cockrell notes. The Rev. Elisha Mitchell, who organized the church in 1822, was a professor at UNC and also the person for whom Mount Mitchell in Yancey County, North Carolina, was named. In the 1950s, Duke Divinity School students and UNC students served the congregation. And UNC alumnus the Rev. Galen Elliott was pastor in the ’60s and ’70s.
The history of the church gives even more meaning to the Carolina Law students’ involvement in The House of Bread Project, as they hope their work will generate more engagement from community members — and maybe create a different kind of legacy in the future.
Nelson wants the project to “continue to gain support in the community, so that the church and its grounds are protected for generations to come. It’s such a special place, and I know that the project will help shepherd it into the next phase of its history, no matter what that eventually looks like,” she says.
No matter what the their careers in law eventually will look like in the future, The House of Bread Project — and the CDL Clinic — provided crucial hands-on experience for them to develop and strengthen their lawyering skills.
“Aurora and Beth had an opportunity to become legal problem solvers: to take a large, unwieldy, amorphous set of problems, break them down conceptually into identifiable, manageable legal issues, prioritize them, and knock them off one at a time,” Kelley says. “Along the way, of course, they informed and counseled the client at every stage.
“That’s perhaps not as sexy as making a dramatic closing argument in a high-profile trial, but it’s a great example of the important work that transactional lawyers do.”
