Marco Conner DiAquoi serves as TakeRoot’s Executive Director. Marco is a New York City based lawyer, organizer and government affairs expert. His past work, rooted in collective action, has focused on mobility justice and advocating for a just, safe, sustainable, and inclusive city. For eight years, Marco was with Transportation Alternatives, a progressive nonprofit and advocacy organization, as interim co-executive director, and legislative & legal director. He has led teams, coalitions and campaigns to win transformative policy improvements locally and statewide. 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 stop 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 United States, 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.