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Originally published on railvolution.org. Rail~Volution is now Mpact: Mobility, Community, Possibility.
Tamar Shapiro to Lead Rail~Volution national transit, equity and community development organization
Tamar Shapiro, a policy expert and nonprofit leader with extensive experience in neighborhood revitalization and new mobility, is the incoming Chief Executive Officer of Rail~Volution, a leading North American transit, equity, and community development organization.
Rail~Volution’s Board President, Diana Mendes, said Shapiro was the Board’s unanimous choice from a very strong pool of candidates.
“We were drawn to Tamar’s energy and vibrancy,” Rail~Volution Board Chair Diana Mendes said.
“She is a leader with big ideas and deep experience working on transit, mobility and development from the community level to state and national policy. She brings an international perspective and a breadth of organizational and on-the-ground expertise. She will build on our strengths and bring new approaches to the challenge of building equitable, transit-oriented communities.”
Shapiro currently serves as Senior Manager, Strategic Initiatives, at the New Urban Mobility Alliance (NUMO). She has focused there on increasing equitable access through new mobility. During the pandemic, she piloted a program to provide micromobility options to essential workers.
From 2012 to 2017, she was President and CEO of the Center for Community Progress. She grew the organization to be the preeminent national voice on strengthening neighborhoods through the reuse of vacant, distressed or deteriorated properties. She also expanded the organization’s reach and impact through its national conference and allied training and technical assistance programs.
A lawyer by training, Shapiro also has worked as a nonresident fellow with the Urban Institute based in Leipzig, Germany, as Senior Director of Urban and Social Policy with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and as Director of Smart Growth America’s Leadership Institute and Governor’s Institute on Community Design.
In accepting the position, Shapiro noted that this is a critical moment for transportation and communities, with the longstanding need for more equitable mobility made even more evident and explicit by the pandemic.
“We urgently need a new vision for mobility that serves all residents,” Tamar Shapiro said.
“We need to define success not by how fast cars move but by how easily and affordably people can access jobs, healthcare, education and other destinations. We need to build a truly multimodal system that retains transit as its backbone but also successfully incorporates the ever-changing suite of new mobility options.
I believe Rail~Volution is uniquely positioned to do this because it focuses squarely and explicitly on the intersection between transit and livable communities. In today’s rapidly changing world, we have the opportunity to partner with cutting-edge practitioners and community leaders to build toward a transformative and just vision for transportation and land use in this country and across North America.”
Shapiro will join Rail~Volution as CEO June 28, 2021. She will lead an organization known for gathering a diverse network of stakeholders around the vision of building more equitable and sustainable communities around transit. The organization draws on a National Steering Committee made up of Partner organizations from across the United States and Canada.
Founded in the late 1990s when many North American cities saw light rail expansion as a tool of economic growth, Rail~Volution now is a leader in sharing expertise about how to realize maximum community benefits from major transit investments (rail, BRT or bus), new mobility options and supportive land use and development. The organization’s core programs include a highly-regarded annual conference, year-round learning through the Information Exchange and a regional capacity-building program, ACT2.
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For more information, contact:
Hilary Reeves, Marketing and Communications Director, Rail~Volution
612-486-5617, hilaryr@railvolution.org