2025 Grant Cycle

Call for Concept Notes: Building Bridges

Opportunity Overview

In 2025, 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.

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

Key Dates:

Concept notes due March 5, 2025

Submit your concept note

Scope and Focus Areas

Building bridges across differences

Mosaic’s 2025 grant cycle will support projects that expand the reach and influence of climate, conservation, and environmental health and justice movements by bridging across sectoral, political, ideological, demographic, and geographic divides. This includes:

Building alignment across identities and sectors in ways that broaden the base of support for action and elevate a diverse set of voices and solutions.
Creating or strengthening alliances to foster collective action and mitigate polarization.

Additionally, projects must be working toward an offense and/or defense outcome through one of the following sub-focus areas:

Building narrative power:

Developing and deploying shared narrative resources and strategic communications to widen the environmental movement tent and catalyze action. Examples include:

Narrative training programs that amplify underrepresented voices and counter misinformation.
Strategic communications campaigns highlighting benefits of green investments, such as job creation in economically marginalized communities.
Projects that cultivate and distribute shared narratives that instill agency and activate individuals, or that deploy these collective narrative strategies at scale to translate ideas into action and impact.

Leveraging the environmental movement to defend democracy:

Building diverse constituencies and shared resources to protect democratic institutions, processes, and leaders essential to the success of our movements. A diverse, pluralistic environmental movement can be an anchor for a powerful civil society as we face unprecedented threats to democratic institutions and practices that simultaneously threaten the health and safety of our communities and our planet. Examples include:

Collaborative efforts between climate organizations and democracy-focused groups to safeguard democratic structures, such as federal agencies or public participation processes.
Bipartisan initiatives to counter industry capture and ensure equitable representation in energy planning.
Coalitions working to protect public participation processes and protect or create spaces for civic participation.

Breaking down silos:

Fostering coordination within environmental, climate, environmental health and justice movements or between environmental and other movements (e.g., labor, immigration). Examples include:

Bridging divides between large, national environmental organizations and community-based groups to develop an aligned state or local-level strategy.
Building cross-sector partnerships to implement and defend IRA investments.

Eligibility Criteria

Selected projects will expand the reach and influence of climate, conservation, and environmental health and justice movements by bridging across sectoral, political, ideological, demographic, and geographic divides AND be working toward an offense and/or defense objective through at least one of the following sub-focus areas: Building narrative power, defending democracy, or breaking down silos.

Projects eligible for consideration must also be:

Advancing field-wide connections and shared tools across one or more of our four areas of movement infrastructure, in alignment with Mosaic’s strategic framework;
Collaborative by design, engaging with local, state, regional, and/or national partners;
Supportive of people and organizations who predominantly focus on clean air and water, a safe climate, healthy and just communities, thriving natural systems, or other related environmental protection and justice topics;
Based in and substantially focused on the United States (including Puerto Rico, Guam, Virgin Islands, or other US affiliated territories);
Be place-based or issue-based and demonstrate accountability to the movement; and
Led by a 501c3 non-profit public charity organization or equivalent (including fiscally sponsored projects or a collaboration of organizations that includes a 501c3 non-profit acting as a lead steward).

Additional consideration will be given to projects that also:

Demonstrate capacity to support existing Mosaic grantees in their region;
Share tools and resources across networks; and/or
Have the capacity to develop programming and tools to support 20+ partner organizations and, if necessary, distribute subgrants.

Funding Tracks

Mosaic is inviting applications between $50,000-$300,000 in the following tracks:

Seed (Single-year | $50K–150K): Piloting new and innovative movement infrastructure projects with startup funding. Focus on testing new ideas, piloting innovative efforts, and laying the groundwork for future impact.
Cultivate (Single or Multi-year | $200K–300K total): supporting and cultivating the capacity of existing collaborative movement infrastructure efforts to sustain their work or achieve a new level of scale and impact. Helps organizations strengthen capacity, scale, and deepen impact.
Harvest (Single-year | up to $150K–250K): actualizing existing movement infrastructure near a specific tipping point (big win, victory, outcome, etc.) with targeted last-mile resources. Ensures organizations have what they need to leverage a major opportunity or fully realize an outcome.

NOTE: These tiers provide general guidelines, but we recognize that movement infrastructure projects are dynamic. If your project does not fit neatly into one category, we encourage you to apply under the tier that best matches your needs and impact goals. We are open to discussing flexible approaches.

Application Process

Look for answers to your questions on our our FAQs (Click here for Spanish). If you still have unanswered questions after February 12, please contact info@mosaicmomentum.org.
Submit your concept note through our online application no later than March 5 at 6pm Pacific. Download a preview of the questions here (click here for Spanish).
Concept notes will be reviewed on a rolling basis, and Mosaic’s staff team will reach out directly to prospective grantees. Due to capacity constraints, we will not be able to take informational calls with all applicants. Thank you for understanding!
Select applicants will be invited to submit a full proposal at the end of March/early April.
Final awards will be made by the end of May, 2025.

FAQs

Apply

At Mosaic, we believe that the power to drive transformative change lies in the strength of our collective efforts. The challenges we face—climate change, environmental degradation, and threats to democracy—demand bold, innovative solutions and the courage to bridge divides. Together, we have the opportunity to build a more inclusive, resilient, and impactful movement that reflects the diversity and aspirations of the communities we serve. It’s no small task.

We invite you to bring your vision, creativity, and commitment to this open call. Your project could be the spark that builds new alliances, elevates critical voices and solutions, and safeguards the progress we’ve fought so hard to achieve. This is our moment to turn challenges into opportunities, to foster unity across differences under a shared vision, and to protect both our planet and our democracy.

Let’s shape the future, together.

Apply