🔒Rolan Young discovered the law was the most effective arena for improving people’s lives

Rolan Joni Young has turned her passion for making people’s lives better into a successful profession as a senior partner attorney with Berchem Moses Law Firm.

Young grew up in Orange and now lives in Woodbridge. She graduated from Hamden Hall Country Day School and in 1978, she went to college at Dartmouth, and then graduated from law school at American University in Washington, D.C., where she stayed for eight years, running the nonprofit Community Health Center Capital Corp. before belatedly taking the bar exam.

“That drove my family absolutely nuts — my father was furious with me,” she jokes now. After her father passed away in 1991, Young, an only child, moved back to Orange to be closer to her mother, who was then only in her mid-50s.

“It was kind of like the perfect excuse. I was living in Washington and it was a great place to be young, but I never really put down deep roots,” she recalls. At the time, Young was running a nonprofit organization that worked with community health centers. In 1992, she moved her nonprofit into what she calls a “little, tiny” office building that her father had left her and was happy to be back home. She spent some time helping community health centers around the country rebuild their facilities so that they could expand access to health care to the uninsured.

“I was blessed to be with people who have that much heart for others and that much talent, and a willingness to teach,” he explains now. “And then when they take you by the hand and you can see people who now have a better condition, it humbles you.”

After a few years back in Connecticut, she closed up her nonprofit and joined the New Haven law firm of Updike Kelly Spellacy for the better part of a decade. There she found herself working on a redevelopment deal with attorney Robert Berchem, who was representing the developer.

“I was representing the New Haven Housing Authority, and they were negotiating for the redevelopment of West Rock. Bob and I battled it out, and really got such a kick out of each other,” she recounts. “You know, when you practice law there’s a part of you that is always invested. But we just got such a kick out of each other as we waged war for our respective clients that the next thing I knew, he and I were having periodic lunches over a period of four years. I didn’t realize that he was really trying to get me to join his firm.”

A few years and a few lunches later, Berchem invited Young to join his firm, Berchem Moses, but first, she wanted to teach a class at Yale.

“She’s very bright, and it’s a dirty word in today’s world, but we really negotiated well,” Berchem recounts now. “When she came, she had a wealth of talent and a lot of ambition. When she became the chairperson at CHAFA [the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority], it took her from countywide to statewide and to a significant degree national-level.

Young is past chair of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority. She currently chairs Start Community Bank’s board of directors and is a member of the Connecticut Housing Coalition. She continues to work with the Community Foundation and she represents the Housing Authorities of New Haven and Bridgeport, the city of Bridgeport and a host of both non-profit and private-sector developers.

“Before she joined the firm, she wanted an academic challenge and took a year off and taught affordable housing [law] at Yale and she excelled in that challenge,” Berchem says. “We wanted to give her an opportunity to be the best she could be and she is doing that.”

“She’s very much community-focused and works hard for others, and not just for herself. On a personal level, that’s what I admire the most about her. Every organization that she joins, it’s because she believes in what it is doing and she’s seeing others benefit from her expertise,” Berchem says.

Practicing law didn’t mean forfeiting her work in community and civic involvement; it simply provided her with a new outlet for making people’s lives better. Realizing that that were so many different areas of law that interested her, she knew she had to choose something that made her heart happy.

“I used to bang my head against the wall a lot to try and choose what I was going to do,” she says. “And I finally figured out that God just had a path for me, and I needed to go along. That’s the honest truth about it.

“There’s a part of me that wanted to be like the Barbra Streisand of litigators — this blazing civil-rights lawyer.”

And so she is.

Affair of the heart

During her time in Washington, D.C., Young says she was exposed to so many creative and effective things that people were doing to improve the condition of humankind, calling it “work of the heart.”

When she started in law, community development wasn’t an industry or practice area yet.

“Now it’s huge,” she says. “I’ve seen a lot of really incredible people doing amazing things to transform communities. That just struck me that you can use your talents in ways that are meaningful for people.

“It’s always been in my heart, it’s always been what I try to do, but sometimes I’m successful, sometimes not.”

She calls what she does today in her law practice “complicated commercial real estate with lots of overlays — the federal regulations, and different kinds of funding and financing have all been cobbled together to make these things work.”

“I have to say the first Community Foundation board meeting that I went to was, I was chair when I walked through the door. The board table looked like it was a bazillion miles long,” she says. “It was a lot of responsibility and figuring out, okay, how do we impact this organization to expand the benefits to more residents of Connecticut, and especially those in need?”

Helping those in need is what drives her, both professionally and personally.

Don’t fence me in

One particular case that Young cites as a pivotal “wow” moment in her law career was the culmination of the now-infamous “Hamden fence case,” which involved a dispute over a fence that was literally right on the line of the town of Hamden and city of New Haven, that prevented residents from West Rock, or residents from Hamden access to Wilmont Road.

“It has a long and torturous history of who put it up [erected the fence], when it was put up, why it was put up, etc.,” Young says. “And it needed to come down. It just needed to come down. There were residents of West Rock in one of the [housing] developments who were disabled, elderly, people of color, limited economic means and needed to be able to access grocery stores,” she explains now.

These residents would have to take a bus all the way to downtown New Haven, change buses for another trek back out to Hamden, to go to a store that was about 10 minutes away by direct route.

Finally, “We were able to figure out how to get that fence taken down” through legal means, she explains. “And not everybody was happy about it, not everybody thought it was a good idea. And I respect that. But it was still the right thing to do. And I have to say that doing the legal work to get that done and then having it come down was probably one of the most significant moments for me.”

Young represented the New Haven Housing Authority in the effort and says, “It really came to a head because we were going to sue the town of Hamden to take the fence down. And in order for the Housing Authority to sue the town of Hamden, we had to get litigation approval from HUD, because Haven Housing Authority is federally funded. And it was through that process of providing them with all the information, background information on the fence, and its history and all of that stuff that really the federal government, I’m so proud of them, came together and said to the town, ‘You have to take down the fence.’ It came down. I think the important thing for us is to recognize that we all come from where we come from in our place and thoughts, and we got to reach a hand out to do better.”

But when the time came to see the product of her long labor come to fruition, she did not personally go to see the fence being removed.

“It was too emotional. Once I knew it was going to come down, I had to take some time for myself. To think about a disabled person who’s prevented from going from a bus stop that he or she could see — it was the right thing to take it down,” she says now.

“As the lawyer, my role in improving that person’s life is really limited. I’m not taking financial risks, I’m not putting together the whole development team. The heavy lifting is being done by everybody else,” says Young. “I’m just trying to do my piece of it to help them do that and it’s really a limited piece. You have architects and developers who are putting their money together, and general contractors. There’s a whole lot of people involved. Being able to do my little piece is really rewarding.”