Riders Alliance Fund fights for reliable, affordable, world-class public transit in order to build a more just and sustainable New York.
About
Riders Alliance Fund educates and organizes bus and subway riders from across the city, with a shared vision: a reliable, accessible, and affordable public transit system that works for every New Yorker, in every community.
Our movement is growing stronger every day. Since we formed in 2012, riders have become one of the most powerful constituencies in New York City. Our members have identified the most pressing issues facing transit riders, organized their communities, and won ambitious agendas around improving public transit.
Most recently, riders have won and fought to defend the enormously successful first-in-the-nation congestion pricing program, implemented in 2025, which will deliver cleaner air, safer streets, and $15 billion to modernize and fix the subway. We successfully lobbied our state leaders for a major expansion of subway service through our ongoing #6MinuteService campaign.
At the city level, we organized to win half-price transit fares for low-income New Yorkers with income under 145% of the Federal Poverty Level through the Fair Fares program. And we continue to organize and advocate for the implementation of 150 miles of busways and bus improvement projects won by riders in 2019 to speed up the slowest buses in the nation.
Betsy Plum, Executive Director
Betsy has spent her career in the social justice field. Before joining Riders Alliance, she served as the Vice President of Policy for the New York Immigration Coalition. While at the NYIC, Betsy led multiple winning policy campaigns, oversaw robust rapid response efforts and organizational growth, and helped set the vision for what a more inclusive New York must look like. She joined Riders Alliance in 2020 bringing her commitment to build a stronger, more thriving New York and a belief that we arrive at this place by investing in our public systems and holding those in power accountable.
In addition to her role at Riders Alliance, Betsy serves on the Board of Directors of Central American Legal Assistance and is a Sterling Fellow, a network of systems leaders working to increase economic mobility across New York City, with racial equity as a central guiding value. She is a graduate of Bard College and the London School of Economics.
Our board
Tolani Arike Adeboye, Chair
Tolani is Senior Director of the Office of Data Management at the New York City Department of Education, where she leads state and Federal reporting initiatives, academic data infrastructure and governance efforts, and strategic data management. Tolani is a lifelong public transit user and is particularly concerned about access for under-served communities and low-income riders. She joined the Riders Alliance as a member-activist in 2012 and is a proud resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Libero Della Piana
Libero is the Managing Director of Organizing and Strategic Partnership with the Drug Policy Alliance. He has 30 years of experience as a writer, editor, organizer, strategist, and educator for social movement organizations. Previously, he was the Senior Strategist of the Alliance for a Just Society, the Communications Director of People’s Action, Digital Director at PeoplesWorld.org, and a Senior Research Associate at the Applied Research Center (now Race Forward). He began organizing in high school in Salt Lake City, Utah and is a graduate of the Center for Third World Organizing’s Movement Activist Apprenticeship Program (MAAP) and its Community Partnership Program. Libero is on the board of the Grassroots Policy Project and the advisory council of IllumiNative. He lives in East Harlem, New York.
Asa Johnson
Asa brings a range of experience to the field of social justice philanthropy and a commitment to building a truly participatory democracy. Born in New York City, Asa is a lifetime MTA commuter. Immediately after graduation, he went to work for the Howard Dean campaign. His experience in that election, trying to build lasting grassroots participation in get-out-the-vote efforts, led to his abiding interest in integrating community organizing with civic participation. For the last ten years Asa has been in hospitality and is an owner of Bar Meridian in Prospect Heights.
Richard L. Oram
Richard has an urban transport career spanning 40 years as a federal and local employee, consultant, and business owner. He earned a U.S. Department of Transportation Outstanding Public Service Award in 1980. In 1990, he formed Commuter Check Services Corp, a national marketing and financial service to facilitate mass use of tax-free transit benefits. He has degrees in economics and business administration from Lehigh University, a master’s degree in urban planning from London School of Economics, and published doctoral work on the economic history of public transport in the US and UK. In 2003 he co-founded Sun Farm Network, an innovative New Jersey solar energy company. He now chairs the Fund for the Environment and Urban Life.
Marco A. Carrión
Marco is the president of Consortium for Worker Education (CWE). He previously served as the Executive Director of El Puente. Marco’s commitment to communities was honed in the national and local labor movements, fighting for the needs of working people. He worked for the AFL-CIO, and later served as the Political and Legislative Director of the New York City Central Labor Council, where he forged deep partnerships among the 300 local unions and 1.3 million members the CLC represented while designing political strategies. Marco has also worked as the Commissioner of New York City’s Community Affairs Unit, as the Chief of Staff for the NYS Senate Health Committee Chair, and for two New York State Governors.
Mark Foggin
Mark currently serves as the Interim Chief Executive Officer at Arab-American Family Support Center. He is a civic sector management consultant helping nonprofit, public sector and other mission-driven organizations that focus on economic and community development. He co-founded the consulting firm Public Works Partners and, before that, spent more than a dozen years in the Bloomberg and Giuliani administrations. Mark has lived in four of the five boroughs and is an enthusiastic multimodal commuter.
Theodore A. Moore
Theo is the Executive Director of ALIGN (Alliance for a Greater New York), a longstanding alliance of labor and community organizations which works at the intersection of economy, environment, and equity to make change and build movement. Prior to this post, he was Vice President of Policy & Programs at the New York Immigration Coalition. He brings more than 15 years of nonprofit and political advocacy experience—in the office of NYC Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, at the Restaurant Opportunities Center United, at ALIGN, and with the Working Families Party. Theo is a founding member of New Kings Democrats and serves on the Board of Directors of the Brooklyn Movement Center, a Black-led, membership-based organization of primarily low-to-moderate income Central Brooklyn residents. He’s a lifelong resident of Brooklyn, born and raised in the East Flatbush section of the borough, and a long-suffering Mets fan.
Benjamin Kabak
Ben is the author of Second Avenue Sagas, a widely read blog that focuses on issues involving mass transit in New York City. He is a graduate of NYU Law School and a partner at Loeb & Loeb, LLC.
Errol Cockfield
Errol is Head of North America Crisis & Issues at Weber Shandwick. As a strategic communications executive and crisis management expert who helps high profile organizations and individuals protect their reputations and advance brand goals, he has been a Partner at Brunswick Group and longtime Senior Vice President for Communications at MSNBC. Prior to MSNBC, he was senior vice president in Edelman NY’s Corporate and Public Affairs division. Errol was press secretary to New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and his successor David Paterson. He was also chief of staff and communications director to the Democratic Conference of the New York State Senate. Errol is also a diversity, equity and inclusion advocate, speaker and writer.
Michael Freedman-Schnapp
Michael is an urban planning and public policy expert working for Forsyth Street Advisors, an advisory and asset management firm focused on affordable housing, real estate, and municipal/impact investment. He was previously the Director of the City Council’s Policy & Innovation Division and Director of Policy for Council Member Brad Lander, where he was critical to the planning and implementation of the largest participatory budgeting process in North America. He teaches urban planning and policy courses at the Pratt Institute and the NYU Wagner School.
Elizabeth Perez
A Riders Alliance member since 2017, Elizabeth joined the board in 2021. Elizabeth Perez currently works as the General Counsel at CASES (Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services). In her prior role as Compliance Officer and Counsel at East Harlem Council for Human Service she was responsible for ensuring compliance with laws and regulations applicable, and before that as Legal Director at Lawyers Alliance for New York, Elizabeth oversaw the provision of pro bono legal services to nonprofits across New York City. In her 13 years of service as a public interest attorney, Elizabeth has aimed to support organizations addressing equity and quality of life for all New Yorkers, and she is especially passionate about access to quality health care. She is a graduate of Columbia University School of Law, the University of London, and Texas A&M University.
Jeremy Soffin
Jeremy is a Senior Vice President at BerlinRosen, a public affairs and communications firm in New York. He previously worked as director of media relations at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), where he served as chief spokesman for the agency that runs New York’s buses, subways, suburban commuter rails and various bridges and tunnels.