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Mosaic

Website:

www.mosaicmomentum.org
Location:

San Francisco, California
Type:

Environmental Grantmaking Initiative
Formation:

2020
Executive Director:

Eva Hernandez

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Mosaic is an environmentalist grantmaking initiative and fiscally sponsored project of the Tides Center, a left-of-center organization created to manage the fiscal sponsorship services of its “sister” organization, the Tides Foundation. The initiative was launched in 2020 with seed funding from left-of-center organizations such as the Pisces Foundation, an grantmaking organization that provides grants to environmental advocacy groups. 1 2 3

Mosaic stated on its website that it had made 418 grants totaling around $32 million as of 2025. It also stated that it had supported more than 800 co-applicants. According to its website, Mosaic’s grantmaking at the time had “reached nearly 20 percent of the environmental movement’s 30,000 organizations.” 4

Mosaic lists its funding partners on its website. Organizations that were listed as funding partners as of 2025 included the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the David Rockefeller Fund, Oceankind, Walton Family Foundation, and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. 5

Background

Mosaic is an environmentalist grantmaking initiative and fiscally sponsored project of the Tides Center, a left-of-center nonprofit created to manage the fiscal sponsorship services of its “sister” organization, the Tides Foundation. Both groups are part of the Tides Nexus of pass-through and fiscal sponsorship nonprofits based in San Francisco, California. 1

The initiative was launched in 2020 with seed funding from left-of-center organizations such as the Pisces Foundation, an environmentalist group that provides grants to environmental advocacy groups. The organization was founded by billionaire and Gap, Inc. chairman Robert J. Fischer and his wife, Randi. David Beckman, the president of the Pisces Foundation as of 2025, sat on the leadership council of Mosaic. 2 3 6

Mosaic states on its website that it had made 418 grants totaling around $32 million as of 2025. It also stated at the time that it had supported more than 800 co-applicants. According to its website, Mosaic’s grantmaking as of 2025 had “reached nearly 20 percent of the environmental movement’s 30,000 organizations.” The initiative aims to help environmentalist groups “build powerful coalitions” in order to influence policy at local, state, and national levels, which includes the passage of legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act. 4

Mosaic’s grantmaking is decided by its governance assembly, which, according to Inside Philanthropy in 2021, included representatives of left-of-center organizations such as the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s oldest and largest environmentalist organizations, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, another of the nation’s largest environmentalist groups. 7

Affiliated Organizations

Mosaic lists its funding partners on its website. Organizations that are listed as funding partners include the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a left-of-center foundation that supports environmental causes, population control programs, and three programs created by its founder David Packard: the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering. 5

Other funding partners include the David Rockefeller Fund, a left-of-center philanthropic organization that makes grants related to art, climate change, and criminal justice, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the charity for the five sons of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.:  John D. III, former U.S. Vice President Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David. Two of these five men, Laurance and David, also established their own foundations, though David announced that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund would receive $225 million after his death, which occurred in 2017, although the fund actually received $250 million after his death. 5 8

Other partners that were listed include Oceankind, a grantmaking LLC founded in 2018 by Lucy Southworth, a geneticist and wife of Google co-founder Larry Page; Tides Foundation, a left-of-center grantmaking organization and pass-through funder for other left-of-center nonprofits; NorthLight Foundation (previously the Dan and Sheryl Tishman Family Foundation), a left-of-center environmentalist grantmaking fund; Walton Family Foundation, the primary charitable outlet of the Walton family, the heirs to Sam Walton’s Walmart fortune; and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (also known as the Hewlett Foundation) a private foundation established in 1966 by Hewlett-Packard co-founder William R. Hewlett, his wife Flora, and his son Walter. 5 9 10

People

One of the founders of Mosaic, Katie Robinson, was the initiative’s executive director from its inception until May 2024. Robinson became a senior innovation fellow at the Pisces Foundation in January 2025, a position she still held as of July 2025. 11

The executive director of Mosaic as of July 2025 was Eva Hernandez, who worked as a field organizer from August 2004 until August 2005 at Green Corps, an environmental organization in the United States that trains recent college graduates in a one-year post-graduate program in grassroots community organizing. After leaving Green Corps, she worked as an organizing director at Dogwood Alliance, a southern environmental advocacy group with a special focus on preventing logging businesses from operating in southern forest areas. 12

After leaving Dogwood Alliance in January 2009, Hernandez became a national field organizer at Moveon.org, also known as MoveOn Civic Action, an organization that describes itself as “the largest independent, progressive, digitally-connected organizing group in the United States.” Hernandez left MoveOn.org in August 2009 to go and work at the Sierra Club, where she was a senior organizing director until July 2014 when she became a regional organizing director, a position she held until October 2017 when she became the deputy national program director until July 2021 when she became the managing director, a position she held until she left the organization in March 2024. 12 13

Hernandez is a member of the board of directors at Friends of the Earth, a global environmentalist group based in the Netherlands. The U.S. branch is based in San Francisco and was started in 1969 by former Sierra Club executive director David Brower. Hernandez was still sitting on the board of directors as of July 2025. 12

Members of the leadership council at Mosaic as of 2025 included David Beckman, then-president of the Pisces Foundation. Beckman previously worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) for 17 years as a senior attorney and as the director of the organization’s first national Water Program. He graduated from Harvard Law School. 3 14

Other members of the leadership council as of 2025 included Kate Sinding Daly, who at the time was the senior vice president of the Conservation Law Foundation, a  public interest law firm and advocacy organization that promotes left-of-center environmental policies, opposes traditional fuel sources such as petroleum and natural gas, and supports the adoption of weather-dependent energy. She was also serving as the executive director of the Northlight Foundation, a left-of-center environmentalist grantmaking fund. 15

Several members listed as alumni on Mosaic’s website as of 2025 were in leadership roles at left-of-center organizations. These members included Abigail Dillen, the president of EarthJustice, a public interest law firm that litigates cases related to left-leaning climate and energy policy; Collin O’Mara, then-president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, one of the nation’s largest and highest-profile environmentalist organizations; and Cecilia Martinez, then-chief of environmental and climate justice at the Bezos Earth Fund, a left-of-center charitable project launched by billionaire Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos in February 2020. 3

Funding

Mosaic is a fiscally sponsored project of the Tides Center, a left-of-center nonprofit created to manage the fiscal sponsorship services of its “sister” organization, the Tides Foundation. The Tides Center has received funding from left-of-center foundations to provide support to Mosaic. 1

Organizations that have made grants to support Mosaic include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which had granted the Tides Center a total of $6.8 million as of July 2025, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which granted the Tides Center a total of $750,000 to support Mosaic. 16 17

References

  1. “Mosaic – Boosting the collective power of the environmental movement across climate, conservation, and environmental health and justice..” Accessed July 28, 2025. https://mosaicmomentum.org/. 
  2. Tindera, Michela. “Robert Fisher.” July 28, 2025. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.forbes.com/profile/robert-fisher/. 
  3. “Who we are – Mosaic.” Accessed July 28, 2025. https://mosaicmomentum.org/about/. 
  4. “Our impact – Mosaic.” Accessed July 28, 2025. https://mosaicmomentum.org/our-impact/. 
  5. “Funding partners – Mosaic.” Accessed July 28, 2025. https://mosaicmomentum.org/funding-partners/. 
  6. “Who We Are.” Pisces Foundation. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://piscesfoundation.org/who-we-are/. 
  7. Kavate, Michael. “To Build the Environmental Movement, a New Initiative Places Grantmaking in Field Leaders’ Hands.” Inside Philanthropy. March 19, 2021. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2021-3-19-to-build-the-environmental-movement-a-new-initiative-places-grantmaking-in-field-leaders-hands. 
  8. Daniels, Alex. “Value of David Rockefeller Bequest to Family Foundation Hits $250 Million.” Philanthropy.com. October 25, 2018. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.philanthropy.com/article/value-of-david-rockefeller-bequest-to-family-foundation-hits-250-million/. 
  9. Harris, Mark. “Oceankind is trying to save the oceans with tech.” May 2, 2022. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/02/inside-the-secretive-silicon-valley-startup-trying-to-save-the-oceans-with-tech/. 
  10. “The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation 1966-1976.” Hewlett Foundation. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.hewlett.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/HewlettAR_1966_76.pdf. 
  11. “Katie Robinson.” LinkedIn. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-robinson-a1aa4b33/. 
  12. “Eva Hernandez – Experience.” LinkedIn. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/in/hernandezeva/details/experience/. 
  13. “Who is MoveOn?.” Accessed July 28, 2025. https://front.moveon.org/about/. 
  14. Beckman, David S. “David S. Beckman.” HuffPost. November 27, 2013. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.huffpost.com/author/david-s-beckman. 
  15. “Kate Sinding Daly.” LinkedIn. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-sinding-daly-1b3245a/. 
  16. “Grants.” Accessed July 28, 2025. https://hewlett.org/grants/?_grant_search=mosaic. 
  17. “Grants – Tides Center (Mosaic).” Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Accessed July 28, 2025. https://www.rbf.org/grants-search. 
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