A New Initiative Places Grantmaking Power in Environment Field Leaders’ Hands

Over the past decade-plus, environmental philanthropy has started to awaken to two longtime rallying cries of front-line advocates: Movements matter as much as technology, and funding should go to the people closest to the problem.

Change thus far has been as much rhetorical as consisting of actual funding realignments, but a new national initiative offers a fascinating example of foundations and environmental nonprofits large and small coming together to put those principles into practice.

Called Mosaic, the initiative issued a $3 million round of grants last month aimed at fostering the infrastructure and networks that social movements need to grow and thrive—funding training, conferences, research and more.

The effort is unique in that support for movement building is hard to come by, particularly within the environmental space. Also quite unique is the initiative’s participatory approach to grantmaking decisions. Instead of a panel of donors or trustees calling the shots, a governance assembly of 16 environmental leaders—from grassroots organizations to some of the nation’s biggest green groups—reviewed and made the final decisions.

“We saw this to be a very promising opportunity to have a structure and a design from the very beginning that focused on power shifting, power sharing and power building,” said governance assembly member Angela Adrar, representing the Climate Justice Alliance, where she was formerly executive director. “It measured the movement and responded to the movement.”

The backers of the initiative are also diverse, including some of the nation’s largest funders, small family foundations and regional institutions. The governance assembly had funder representatives from the Bullitt, NorthLight and Pisces foundations, a contingent that was intentionally a super-minority to ensure decisions were made by movement leaders.

In total, the initiative was supported by 16 funders, including the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, David Rockefeller Fund, Caldwell Fisher Family Foundation, Campbell Foundation, Garfield Foundation, High Tide Foundation, Overbrook Foundation, Posner Foundation of Pittsburgh, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Tides Foundation.

I spoke with Adrar and others involved with the effort to learn more about the grantees they chose, the dynamics of the group, how Mosaic came about and what’s on the horizon.

Who did Mosaic choose?

Mosaic, which is fiscally sponsored by the Tides Center, issued an open call for proposals in October 2020. The response was overwhelming. The team received 455 proposals, more than half from BIPOC-led organizations. Proposed project budgets totaled $126 million, from both existing and newly formed collaboratives across the nation.

In teams, the group spent November and December reviewing over 400 proposals. “It felt like finals week at times,” said Katie Robinson, project director of Mosaic. “Our governance committee was sending around Spotify playlists at certain points.”

Mosaic ultimately issued 21 grants to 91 co-applicants, reflecting the initiative’s strong emphasis on organizational collaboration. Grantees cover 21 states and a wide range of environmental issues, including climate, water, air, toxics, food and agriculture. Most also center equity and justice in their approaches.

The initiative hosted regular Q&A calls about the RFP that ended up “organically” facilitating collaboration, Robinson told me. Callers would share what they were doing at the end of the calls, and people started to connect.

Mosaic breaks movement infrastructure into a six-part “honeycomb”: communications, leadership development, advocacy tools and training, data and information, relationships and trust, and philanthropic innovation. Each project works to develop those capacities.

Lead grantees—all grants went to coalitions of applicants—included groups like the National Black Environmental Justice Network, whose relaunch we profiled last July, as well as regional organizations such as Waukesha County Green Team, which works in its namesake 400,000-person Wisconsin county. Two grants went to coalitions led by governance assembly members, including a $135,000 grant to a group led by DEPLOY/US, whose founder and CEO, Andrea Yodsampa, was a member of the assembly.

How did Mosaic choose these grants?

Mosaic’s grants were selected by its governance assembly, which intentionally reflected the vast diversity of the country’s environmental movement. It includes representatives from the so-called big greens, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, local groups like PUSH Buffalo and Savannah Riverkeeper, and identity-based organizations, including NDN Collective and Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, Inc. The makeup ensured powerful groups and those who have historically lacked resources had to work together through differences in philosophy.

“Conflict was there, but we leaned into that tension,” said Adrar, who is currently director of the Environmental Justice Movement Fellowship at the Tishman Environmental and Design Center. “We recognized the power dynamics, even amongst ourselves as the governance assembly.”

While the group was not always aligned, members were quick to agree that Mosaic’s grants should go to smaller groups, groups led by people of color, and groups that are representative of the communities they serve, those that center equity in their work.

“Even if you’re a land trust in Wisconsin, white-led, your goals are not separable from whether funding for the environmental justice community in Wisconsin or elsewhere is equitable and fair,” said David Beckman, president of the Pisces Foundation, who sat on the governance assembly.

One intention is to provide a counterweight to an environmental landscape that has seen the budgets of the richest, often white-led organizations expand, while smaller and regional organizations—particularly those led by people of color—struggle to secure funding. As the initiative’s equity statement notes, roughly 95% of grantmaking dollars have typically gone to white-led organizations, many led by heterosexual, cisgender men.

“For big national groups, the asymmetry of resources is becoming untenable from our point of view, as well. And we recognize we need to play a part in resolving it, as well,” said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, who was a member of the governance assembly.

“There are such historic, deep breaches of trust between environmental groups and big national groups, like my own. The ongoing scarcity of funding for all but a few well-resourced national groups creates real tension. So for this group to come together, work through power dynamics, historical tensions and divides, was a big deal,” said Dillen.

How Mosaic came about

The idea for Mosaic dates back at least three years, to conversations between Beckman—a veteran of the Natural Resources Defense Council—and fellow philanthropic leaders. As Beckman tells it, he was animated both by pride in what the environmental movement had accomplished, but also by concern that the movement was not meeting the pace and scale of current challenges.

Those discussions with fellow funders kept coming back to what was the key ingredient in past successful movements. That is, whether the focus was on regulating tobacco, realizing marriage equality or promoting conservative values, other movement successes benefited from substantial investments in infrastructure: the communications tools, leaders, data analysis, relationships and more that create the conditions for growth and unlock the power to make change.

“In the field, you can have all the greatest ideas, but if you don’t have the power to get all of it through, then all that policy sort of amounts to Ph.D. dissertations,” Beckman told me.

So in 2018, Pisces launched what became an 18-month design process. It held some 16 design workshops, with in-person sessions in the Bay Area and New York, as well as virtual sessions. It polled and surveyed field leaders.

As the group focused on launching Mosaic as a participatory grantmaking initiative, a key early question emerged: Who decides who decides? The leaders settled on few guidelines: a supermajority of leaders from the field, a majority of people of color and a majority of women. From over 100 nominations, they chose the 16-member governance assembly that made the final calls. “We were really blown away by the response,” Robinson said.

COVID-19 grants

When Mosaic launched its governance assembly in March 2020, the group intended to issue only one request for proposals that year. Then the pandemic struck. Movement groups, particularly the small, community-based grassroots organizations Mosaic sought to bolster, were suddenly scrambling to move their operations online overnight.

“We were hearing about the need for Zoom licenses, laptops, shared resources on doing remote work,” said Robinson. “Given that, we decided to pivot.”

Some 550 organizations across 49 states applied for COVID-19 funding from Mosaic, requesting more than $8 million. Since that call, the group has issued $1.4 million in COVID-19 rapid response grants to 161 organizations, half of them focused on health and justice. A map of those grants can be found on Mosaic’s website.

Those grants were meant to help groups survive through a uniquely trying time, but Mosaic also recognized that responding to the field’s urgent and pressing infrastructure needs would itself build movement infrastructure. Robinson and her colleagues asked themselves: “How do we build back stronger with more collaborative capacity than we had before.”

What happens when requests are 42 times greater than your budget?

Faced with an overwhelming number of requests, Mosaic decided to launch a platform to share those proposals with the rest of philanthropy. Called MosaicConnect, it will host the submissions of the 400-plus applicants who met certain basic requirements and who wish to have their proposal made public.

The hope, of course, is to draw more funding to these projects. “It will not only create the opportunity to catalyze new funding, it is also a mirror to the field,” Robinson said. “A clear picture of the needs of the movement as stated by the organizations in the movement.”

MosaicConnect calls to mind a similar approach taken by Lever for Change, a MacArthur Foundation affiliate that’s been hosting an array of grant challenges since late 2019. In its Bold Solutions Network, Lever for Change keeps track of proposals that didn’t win for the benefit of other interested funders.

Mosaic’s open application process demonstrated the value of greater transparency and open processes, said Beckman, one of only three grantmakers on the governance assembly. “For me as a funder, I found it as eye-opening as my colleagues,” he said. “Foundations often see only a small amount of the need themselves.”

Given many governance assembly members’ experience of chasing grants for their own organizations, the group was aware that the flip side of an open process was that many organizations would spend hours on proposals but get nothing in return. Yet there was also a strong desire to ensure, particularly in Mosaic’s first grant cycle, that the effort reached beyond those with personal connections to the group. “There’s always a balance that you’re trying to strike,” Robinson said.

Beyond launching its new platform, Mosaic is hosting a pair of conversations in mid-March for organizations whose submissions were not accepted, as well as offering individual consultations.

Importantly, this is not the group’s final round of grants. Mosaic aims to issue annual requests for proposals and plans to give out $5 million in 2021.

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