Aisha T. Snead

Aisha T. Snead

Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service

Panelist, Estate Planning for Underserved Communities

A native of West Baltimore, Aisha has been a social justice and equity advocate since she was a teenager.  She started her career in public health and found that her own experience with death, loss and grief in 2018, would shift her career trajectory to an intersection where public health, public interest, and policy meet.  Since then, she has focused on death’s cyclical impact on Social Determinants of Health, urban environments and housing destabilization.  Aisha is a trained and certified “End of Life Planner” and Advocate for Equity in Death.  Her work highlights the systemic injustices that reveal that “death” is not “the great equalizer”, but it can be “a good gatherer”.

Adept at building relationships, Aisha has solidified herself as a community connector and organizer.   She is a Co-founder of the Chesapeake Cultural Society, a progressive socially and environmentally conscious organization dedicated to the historical research and preservation of African American Communities, Cemeteries, Cultural, Religious and the Death Practices of the Chesapeake-Tidewater region.  Aisha is also an appointed Board Member on multiple Trauma informed and Art based organizations in Baltimore City.  Her work has been featured in the Washington Post and New York Times.

Aisha serves as the Community Outreach/Project Coordinator for the Advanced Planning Program at Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service (MVLS).  To this position she brings her skills and networks to amplify the necessity of Advanced Planning for underserved communities by demystifying and making accessible the process of Estate Planning.  These proactive and preventative measures increase better social and health outcomes for individuals, families and whole communities by decreasing the loss of legacies, community blight, and creating housing stabilization for generations to come.