Building Bridges

Overview

Opportunity Overview

Mosaic will fund movement-building efforts — collaborative projects, coalitions, networks etc. — designed to fill critical movement infrastructure gaps (as described in Mosaic's strategic framework) within US based climate, conservation, environmental health and justice movements, with a focus on those aimed at building bridges to scale our influence.

Building Bridges

As we enter into a new federal administration, networks, organizations, and leaders are aligning around effective offensive and defensive strategies to protect gains and continue making progress at the state and local level while expanding and strengthening their long-term power base. Our movement landscape analysis and community feedback highlight the need for movement infrastructure to build bridges that create more powerful coalitions, strengthen narrative capacity to build influence, break down silos, and more directly enroll the movement in defending democracy. Mosaic’s 2025 grant cycle will expand on our previous grantmaking to support this work.

Specifically, we will support projects that build bridges within and across environmental movements, and between environmental and other aligned constituencies and movements, and also address one or more of the following sub-focus areas:

* Building narrative power: Strengthening communications, storytelling and public understanding around climate and environmental justice.
* Leveraging the environmental movement to defend democracy: Protecting democratic processes, institutions, and leaders essential to movement success.
* Breaking down silos: Within climate, conservation, and environmental health and justice movements or across issues.

Objectives

Building on our previous grantmaking, the movement infrastructure these grants support will bolster groups’ ability to achieve their near- and long-term objectives, both offensive and defensive:

* Offense: Seizing state and local opportunities to drive policy change, implement federal policies like the IRA and IIJA, and protect gains while building long-term power across diverse coalitions.
* Defense: Safeguarding progress from the past several years, including defending federal climate investments like the IRA and IIJA, and addressing emerging threats through broad coalitions.

Funding

Grant Range: $50,000-$300,000.

Eligibility

_You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website._

* Mosaic supports projects that are:
* Led by a 501c3 non profit public charity organization or fiscal sponsor (including a collaboration of organizations that includes a 501c3 nonprofit acting as a lead steward);
* Based in and substantially focused on the United States, (including Puerto Rico, Guam, Virgin Islands, or other US affiliated territories
* Advance field wide connections and shared tools across our six focus areas that are widely beneficial to multiple organizations (as opposed to one or a small few
* Supportive of people and organizations who predominantly focus on clean air & water, a safe climate, healthy & just communities, thriving natural systems, or other related environmental protection and justice topics; and Advancing field wide connections and shared tools across our six focus areas that are widely beneficial to multiple organizations (as opposed to one or a small few).

Ineligibility

* What Mosaic will not fund:
* Projects not proposed by a non profit public charity or fiscal sponsor that is a non profit public charity, or inconsistent with a legitimate charitable purpose and applicable law
* Projects based in and focused on issues predominantly outside the US
* Projects that are only focused on one organization or one campaign without broader relevance and use. (For example, a proposal to support innovative communications for climate advocates in the Southeast US would be considered for funding; a similar proposal to support the climate communications of a single organization typically would not.)
* Projects that are not focused on one or more of the six areas of Mosaic’s infrastructure (communications, leadership, data & information, relationships & trust, philanthropic innovation)
* Projects that are not focused on healthy and just communities, clean air and water, a safe climate, thriving natural systems, or other related environmental protection and justice topics.