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Bringing the Talent
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MINORITY BUSINESSPERSON OF THE YEAR
For Rolan Joni Young, Esq., the scales of justice are evenly balanced between community development and the practice of law
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Business New Haven
1/25/1999
By: Deborah Ketai
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It's not hard to have a vision about what New Haven can be when you've already lived it,” says Rolan Joni Young.
Growing up in Orange and Woodbridge during the 1960s and '70s, she says, “We all said we were from New Haven.” But after nearly 15 years away from home, Young came back to find a growing divide between city and suburbs. The city clearly needed help.
Fortunately for New Haven, Young is now in an ideal position to provide that help as program director of the New Haven Local Initiatives Support Corp. (New Haven LISC).
The organization covers New Haven County as the local affiliate of the country's biggest community development support agency. To help community development corporations (CDCs) preserve and revitalize low-income neighborhoods, LISC offers financial and technical assistance, raising money both locally and nationally to develop affordable housing, day-care centers and other community projects.
New Haven LISC played a key role in putting together the financing for Dwight Place, the 78,000-square-foot Whalley Avenue shopping center anchored by Shaw's. Last year LISC leveraged and made available more than $32 million in development dollars for New Haven.
The organization also completed financing for both a day-care center to be located in the city's Hill neighborhood, as well as a 20-unit cooperative housing project slated for Richard Street in the Fair Haven section.
Though, at 38, Young says she's had no real career plan (“I've just let God take care of that,” she says), her upbringing, schooling and early work experience all combined to bring her to this point.
Her father, a real-estate broker, owned a lot of property. Young remembers accompanying him at his closings, as well as going on site when he rehabbed his buildings.
In 1978, Young left home. First stop: Dartmouth College, where she majored in government. Then: law school at American University in Washington, D.C.
Young's father liked the idea of his daughter in the nation's capital. He wanted her to see a city with a large African-American community, a city in which black people owned businesses and homes and ran much of the political structure.
During her last year of law school, and for a year after graduation, Young worked for the foundation that guided Howard University's real-estate development programs. From there she was recruited for American Security Bank by Karen Kollias, “something of a national guru in economic development,” according to Young. Kollias made Young an assistant vice president for community-development lending within the bank's real-estate group.
The bank's promise to lend money for sound real-estate deals with demonstrable community benefits to Washington's minority neighborhoods - and with no dollar limit on its total investment - excited the young law-school grad.
Within 18 months, she and Kollias had tripled the size of their group, committed a quarter of a billion dollars in loans and financed more than 4,000 units of housing and about a million square feet of office and retail space.
There, in the country's most political city, Young learned, “A project is feasible or it's not. If it's feasible, you can move forward with it - and politics really has very little do with whether a project is feasible.”
The young woman could not escape politicians, however. One told her there was a connecting door between the bedroom and the boardroom. “I told him, 'That may be, but the door is locked, and I have the key,'” Young laughs.
After a couple of years, she was again recruited away, this time to become chief operating officer and executive director of the Community Health Center Capital Corp. For the next five years, Young continued her community development routine: technical assistance, real estate development and financing.
She also became involved in some unusual projects, including helping the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) decide how to rebuild the community health centers in Miami in the wake of Hurricane Andrew.
In 1993, Young finally took the bar exam. She wound up as an attorney in the corporate department of Updike, Kelly & Spellacy, “the best professional home I've ever had in my career.”
Young's family was slightly less satisfied. They bemoaned the fact that the law firm's egalitarian business cards didn't list her as “Rolan Joni Young, Esq.” (“If you could just get an 'Esquire' in this article for my mother and grandmother, the two who really kicked my butt for eight years to take the bar, I'd really appreciate it!”)
Young loved practicing law. But when Yale's law school made her an adjunct professor in its clinical program for housing and community development, she rediscovered her appetite for community development - this time in the city she called home. Last March, she left the law firm for LISC.
Shifting gears was hard.
“I'm very impatient,” she says, “not so much with people as with process and having things get done. I'm the kind of person who plants a flower and wants to see it bud the next day. We're out there planting a lot of seeds right now. I feel a sense of urgency about it, and sometimes it's very frustrating.”
Young says she tries to focus simply “on planting the next seed. And hopefully someone will tap me on the shoulder and say, 'Look - a flower!'”
Young was “honored and flabbergasted” to learn she had been named Business New Haven's Minority Businessperson of the Year. “I don't know the criteria or who nominated me,” she says.
But she sees no incongruity in being called a “businessperson” despite working for a not-for-profit. Like any business, she notes, LISC is responsible to its “customers.”
Young and her staff work out of office space at the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce, and chamber president Matthew Nemerson sits on LISC's local and state advisory committees. Young credits LISC's close involvement with the chamber with bringing the business community to the table and helping the organization adhere to sound business principles.
In return, LISC is making the New Haven area a better place to do business. Its “products” - job training programs, affordable housing and accessible day-care centers - help local companies develop, attract and retain good employees.
As if she didn't have enough on her plate, Young recently became first vice president of the Greater New Haven NAACP and chair of the chapter's housing and economic-development committee. “It's a nice tie-in with what I'm doing,” she says, “an opportunity for me to develop a single agenda with many components.”
Eventually, she would love to go back to Updike to practice law. But she's not sure how to combine her love of intellectual challenge with an emotional side that simply wants to help people.
“I'm compelled by the NAACP because it's my people bleeding,” Young says. “I'm compelled by children because they're hurting. But there's also a piece of me that enjoys seeing whether I've documented a loan transaction well.”
In her spare time, Young builds doll houses. “I have eight or nine in my basement and my mom's basement, all in various stages of development,” she says. Since the fun for her is in the building, she plans to give the finished houses to kids whose parents don't have the money to buy ready-made ones.
More affordable housing? “No,” she says with a laugh. “These suckers are expensive!”
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