We are proud to announce that Marco Conner DiAquoi has joined TakeRoot Justice as our new Executive Director. He comes to our leadership team after a committee of TakeRoot managers, board members and union staff collaborated with executive search firm NPAG on our leadership search. He takes over from our Interim Co-Directors, long time TakeRooters Sadia Rahman and April Herms.
Marco is a New York City based lawyer, organizer and government affairs expert who epitomizes TakeRoot’s values and theory of change. His work, rooted in collective action, has focused on mobility justice and advocating for a just, safe, sustainable, and inclusive city. For the past eight years Marco has held the roles of Interim Co-Executive Director, Deputy Director, and Legislative & Legal Director at the non-profit advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. He has led teams, coalitions and campaigns to win transformative policy improvements for New York City and New York State. His accomplishments include working alongside crash victims, survivors and their loved ones to win numerous life-saving traffic safety policies and laws; bringing Open Streets to New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic; and co-leading the creation of the first U.S. restorative justice program for vehicular offenses. His work also helped end the targeted police enforcement against more than 40,000 low-wage, immigrant food delivery cyclists in New York City.
Previously, while working at the Council on International & Public Affairs, then a U.N advisory organization, Marco researched programs on alternative economics and workers’ rights while organizing actions targeting harmful multinational corporations. Marco is a proven non-profit leader with a deep understanding of all the components of a social justice organization. His values and sense of justice are rooted in his upbringing in Denmark – a country with strong worker unions and universal healthcare, where his mother still works as a unionized nurse; and in his roots in the U.S., where his father grew up in Jim Crow-era Alabama. A graduate of Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and London School of Economics & Political Science, Marco is no stranger to TakeRoot Justice. He was a legal fellow with TakeRoot’s Housing Rights Team (then the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center) eight years ago. Marco has been a New Yorker for two decades and currently lives in Brooklyn with his Haitian/Danish/African-American family.
Please join us in welcoming Marco to TakeRoot Justice, and stay tuned for future events and opportunities to meet and engage our new ED.