Roc Nation Is Culture-Setting And Change-Making

Dania Diaz, Managing Director of Philanthropy at Roc Nation and Executive Director of the Shawn Carter Foundation, is harnessing business, culture, and humanity in the pursuit of justice.

“Roc Nation is an entertainment company, but one committed to leading social change in groundbreaking ways. It’s about character as a company, about doing the hard work of real change-making instead of performative statements.”

—Dania Diaz, Managing Director of Philanthropy, Roc Nation, and Executive Director, Shawn Carter Foundation

Dania Diaz, Managing Director of Philanthropy at Roc Nation and Executive Director of the Shawn … [+] Carter Foundation.

Roc Nation

Jessica Pliska: We’re at New York City’s Javits Center with 5,000 attendees from across the country, who showed up for Roc Nation and The United Justice Coalition’s second annual UJC Summit. Your team spent a year organizing this day. How does it feel seeing the power and vibrancy of the community that has come out, especially the students?

Dania Diaz: It’s a moment of incredible joy. It restores for me a level of faith in humanity that gets challenged every single day. This kind of action is a response to hopelessness, despair, anger, and fatigue. It’s an action that demonstrates our collective and restless pursuit of a better and just society. And it’s inspiring to see so many students: their voices, presence and leadership matter and give us hope.

Pliska: Today they’ll be hearing from leaders, activists, and entertainers, like Soledad O’Brien, Angela Rye, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, Fat Joe, Aidan Kohn-Murphy among many others. Besides words of wisdom from this powerhouse line-up, what do you hope these students take away?

Diaz: That they can do something with their anger and frustration. That they felt the power of people working together on issues they care about. That they connected with people here and got informed about issues they want to impact. That they can create their own platforms for change.

Pliska: It sounds like a triumphant day for you, but I know it was built on the foundation of an entire career devoted to youth, education, and social justice. What do you trace that back to?

Diaz: My story starts with my parents, who immigrated to Queens from the Dominican Republic, with a middle school education and not really knowing English. My dad got a job as a line cook at the Harmony Club and worked many years until he retired. My mom was a seamstress at a factory in the Bronx. Their days were long and hard. I witnessed how hard my parents worked to take care of our family. It was also during the crack-cocaine epidemic and a lot of families in my neighborhood were devastated by the influx of drugs. The places that we were allowed to go were school, family events, or the library. In all of this, I understood how opportunities were afforded to some and not others and it shaped my worldview.

Pliska: What other things influenced your childhood?

Diaz: Education was important, always. I was a strong student. In middle school, there was a program, now called Oliver Scholars, which recruited high-achieving students to support their entry into private school. It opened incredible doors for me, but my transition was hard. I was the only person in my grade traveling for more than an hour. The commute was long and the days were long. I was going to school with very wealthy students. I felt like I was living in two different worlds every single day.

Pliska: Do you have memories during that period of belonging and not belonging?

Diaz: At any given point, I felt either a sense of community or feelings of isolation. I felt a great sense of belonging with other Oliver Scholars students like me, traveling to and from these different worlds. That was a source of strength. And we didn’t know until much later that we were developing a real skill in doing that. On the other hand, it was hard to share my experiences with my family. They didn’t understand what was happening in this environment. I didn’t know I had a Spanish accent until I got to private school because in my neighborhood, everybody spoke the same. There were a lot of firsts.

The United Justice Coalition Summit in 2022.

United Justice Coalition

Pliska: You’ve ended up in what I know you think of as your dream job, but yours wasn’t a linear career path. How did your career start to take shape?

Diaz: I was always inspired by learning environments. I loved learning new things. I got my undergraduate degree at Columbia University, and graduate degree at Teachers College there. I worked in executive education at Columbia Business School, gravitating toward management education in the nonprofit sector. Given my own experience, it was natural for me to focus on charitable organizations. I felt a connection to executives working in fields that impacted my life and decided to direct my energies to the kinds of places that nurtured me.

Pliska: In a real full-circle moment, you landed at Oliver Scholars and stayed for six years, even serving as acting executive director. What was that like?

Diaz: On the one hand, it was a gratifying homecoming. On the other hand, it was depressing to see that a lot of our students’ struggles were the same ones that I had faced 20 years earlier. But I loved that there was a safe space for students to process what they were going through, that we could give language to both the experience of isolation¾talking about things like code-switching and imposter syndrome¾and the beauty of community, and that we could elevate student voices.

Pliska: That’s a great segue to Roc Nation, and Team Roc, the social justice and impact division you lead, because student voice and student action is a key principle driving your work. Why is that?

Diaz: Student voices are critical. They are leaders today and they’ll be better leaders tomorrow, as long as they have a community of support and we want to be that support system. That’s why we started the UJC Summit State Ambassador Program, a 10-week internship supporting students from across the nation as they develop strategies and action plans to generate awareness about the summit. They’ve done an incredible job spreading the word about the summit and expanding its footprint.

Pliska: What other principles would you say drive the work of Team Roc?

Diaz: Roc Nation is first and foremost an entertainment company, but one that is making a huge commitment to leading social change and doing it in groundbreaking ways. We think about business and humanity. We do our work fearlessly and also in concert with the communities we serve. We build systems and institutions that reframe how people think about leadership, community, advancement, and justice. We help to uplift the voices of those whose voices go unheard.

Pliska: What does that look like in practice? Can you bring it life for me?

Dania: It’s about character as a company, about doing the hard work of real change-making instead of performative statements about commitments to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice that then fall off. Our work addresses what needs to be fixed with systems we’ve relied on for centuries that keep Black and Brown people behind. We talk publicly about how the money spent on the criminal justice system outpaces what we spend on education. That mass incarceration has held back talented people—the overwhelming majority being Black and Brown individuals—who might otherwise have fruitful and productive lives today. We partner with the NFL to highlight police and gun violence through PSAs that show the impact on families who have lost loved ones, or by getting players and coaches to wear helmet decals honoring both victims and social justice advocates. We lead multimedia advocacy initiatives to shine a light on inhumane prison conditions, food security as a human right, and corrupt police departments that perpetrate sexual assault and wrongful convictions. And we produce social justice summits, like today’s, in partnership with a cross section of teams and communities we serve.

Pliska: Back to today’s summit, then. What are you personally taking away from this experience today?

Diaz: I love being in the work with all of these people—watching the ideas come to life, bringing student leaders into the fold, and seeing 5,000 people come together for social justice. Days like today bring me incredible joy.