ALUMNI/AE NEWS
Tara Kolar Ramchandani ’00 As a young lawyer interviewing for an associate position, Tara was asked what made her want to do public service. She answered that the ethos of a Friends’ Central education is that service is central to one’s obligation as a citizen of the world. It is no surprise that Relman, Dane & Colfax PLLC, a civil rights litigation firm based in Washington, D.C., hired her for the position. She has been at the firm since 2008. Focusing on issues close to our national consciousness, Tara’s docket includes cases involving fair housing, predatory lending practices in for-profit educational institutions, public accommodations, employment discrimination, and disability discrimination. Her focus in recent months has been on a mortgage lending discrimination case in New York, in which she represents eight plaintiffs against a bank that targeted a predatory mortgage product at borrowers living in minority neighborhoods, which predictably resulted in foreclosure and the loss of equity in her clients’ homes. Prior to joining Relman, Dane & Colfax, Tara was a law clerk for the Honorable Algenon L. Marbley of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
Tara with her husband, Chiraag, and daughter, Roopa
An international relations major at Brown University, Tara studied in Venezuela, later returning for six months to work on micro-financing for women. Professionally, she initially thought that she would focus on issues like asylum and immigration but found, through summer experiences while at Harvard Law School, that these topics took her too far from the people she was trying to help. During her first summer of law school, Tara worked in Jackson, Mississippi. She was assigned to a case involving a 12-year-old African American boy accused of driving a getaway car following a capital crime. The defendant’s case had been suffering from lack of legal attention and expertise and was resolved relatively easily – an incredible introduction to the impact a lawyer can have. The community of people involved in civil rights work in Mississippi was close and supportive, but the experience of working in the American South was nonetheless jarring. Neither, black nor white, Tara didn’t fit easily into Mississippi’s cultural expectations. Parenting their daughter, Roopa, and traveling often for work, Tara and her husband Chiraag Bains live busy lives based in Washington, D.C. She reflects with admiration on her friends from FCS, many of whom are also working in the public interest. An FCS “lifer,” Tara said that it was hard to leave this tight-knit community, but that she had been well prepared by her Friends’ Central teachers. Knowing how to ask questions, write papers, and most importantly, how to think critically were essential skills she carried forward. Even now, Tara says it is difficult to separate who she is from Friends’ Central. Wherever she goes, she looks to build a community of people invested in one another and in the wider world. Wherever she is, Tara says she is grateful, both for her time at FCS, and for the knowledge that there is a school working to make the world a more just place to live.
In Memoriam Nan Baker Wertman ’34
Richard Fussell ’47
George Hudock ’55
Elizabeth Kelly Evans ’35
Marguerite Ridge Perrone ’48
Richard Fetter ’64
Emily Edgerton Gladstone ’36
Barry Reimenschneider ’48
Jean Class Sattin ’65
Faith Slevin Quillen ’38
Carl Reichert ’49
Carolyn Ulmer Gorman ’66
Frederick Eissler ’39
David Ellis ’51
Nancy Alessandroni Carolan ’68
Margaret Fisher White ’40
Dorothy Lieberman Grant ’53
Albert Campbell ’70
Norman Robinson ’46
Anne Trautwein Patlovich ’53
Sher Kung ’01
William Ravdin ’46
Virginia Lundgren Bortin ’54
Spring 2015 magazine
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