Katie Robinson and her team at Mosaic are determined to solve our most pressing environmental issues. Robinson is the director of Mosaic, a national grantmaking initiative focused on strengthening the infrastructure that supports organizations and individuals working to protect our air, water, and climate. The team, including a small staff and a governance assembly of environmental field leaders and funders, believes that bold and courageous leadership is critical to address climate change and other key environmental issues. But, leadership is only one part of the puzzle. We need a vast network of connections and shared resources—tools, like data, information, and communications—called movement infrastructure, that can support and align a sprawling ecosystem of environmental advocates and activists towards collective, scaled goals.

In order to reach these goals, Mosaic’s team spent over two years speaking to more than 100 environmental leaders to determine their unique field-wide infrastructure needs and landed on six focus areas including: communications, leadership development, data and information, and network building. By speaking with these leaders, and by inviting a diverse set of leaders from grassroots organizations, NGO’s, and funders to the funding decision-making table as a model for participatory grantmaking, Mosaic hopes to break down the silos that dilute power and impede progress.

After this two-year period, in 2020, Mosaic kicked off its grantmaking by giving $3 million to 21 collaborative grant projects that focused on climate, water, air, toxics, food and agriculture, and land. The project also distributed an additional $1.5 million last year to 169 organizations to support the emergent needs of grassroots groups as a result of the pandemic. Now in its second year, Mosaic has completed its second RFP and the governance assembly is actively reviewing 685 proposals, with the goal of distributing $6 million in grants by the end of 2021. The impact of this work has been substantial and has led to the expansion of a range of networks, democratized data access, deepened organizing capacity, scaled leadership development and training opportunities, and advanced new ways of thinking about environmental protection. What’s more, the program’s popularity is sending a powerful message about the need to integrate, connect, and align a vast network of environmental organizations to affect broad level change.

Tides’ Charnelle Etti spoke to Katie Robinson to learn more about the organization’s vision, Katie’s experience at the helm of Mosaic, the organization’s unique approach to environmental protection, and why Mosaic decided to come to Tides as a social venture partner.

Read the full article about solving environmental issues with powerful networks by Charnelle Etti & Hawwa Muhammad at Tides.