Welcome to MOZAIK! For over a decade, MOZAIK (formerly, the Neda Nobari Foundation) has worked toward social and environmental justice by seeding over 200 grassroots organizations, through $10M in philanthropic support, for the inception of arts, education, media, environment and film initiatives, internationally, nationally, and across California. We have always worked to align our resources with our values while fostering a full and authentic expression of our passions and purpose.

We celebrated in 2019, ten years of intense work by announcing a pause to our strategic grantmaking and taking time to reflect on our work to date. Where did we have our greatest impact and where did we achieve our highest purpose? We needed the space to vision and envision what was to come next. Looking closely at our integral part in the culture of philanthropy, we had to examine some unsettling practices that do little to upend the status quo of global poverty, climate chaos, and the political, social and cultural inequality that continues to exclude essential voices from the decision-making table. Ultimately, we asked two poignant questions: What has philanthropy, a $400-billion-a-year industry, really accomplished to bridge the socio-economic and cultural divide? And importantly, where could we as a foundation make the most meaningful difference? Our response is MOZAIK, a conceptually new foundation for the new millennium.

MOZAIK’s mission is to explore and model new practices in philanthropy with disruptive, creative, and catalytic potential. In 2020, we will invite communities to help us to govern our grant-making decisions. We will invite in those who know the organizations and initiatives that will serve their communities the very best; thereby, democratizing access to our foundation’s philanthropic equity, while exploring new modes of participatory, inclusionary, and socially innovative grantmaking. In tandem, we will be working to align our investment practices with our mission, intentionally divesting and investing with a newfound commitment to advancing a just economy. We are deeply inspired by the collective journey ahead. MOZAIK welcomes you to join us.