Building a movement that can take full advantage of the IRA

The Inflation Reduction Act is ambitious climate policy, but
history shows that ambitious policy is not always followed by
ambitious implementation. In this episode, Hahrie Han of
Johns Hopkins University and David Beckman of the Pisces
Foundation talk about Mosaic, a grant-making coalition that aims
to help build a robust movement infrastructure to ensure that
vulnerable and underserved groups can take full advantage of the
significant funding offered by the IRA.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


For all that has been written about the Inflation Reduction Act,
the most salient fact about it remains widely underappreciated.
What is significant about the bill is not just that it sends an
enormous amount of money toward climate solutions, but that the
money is almost entirely uncapped.


The total amount of federal money that will be spent on climate
solutions via the IRA will be determined not by any preset limit,
but by demand for the tax credits. The more qualified applicants
that seek them, the more will be spent. The Congressional Budget
Office estimated the bill’s spending at $391 billion, but a
report last year from Credit Suisse put the number at $800
billion and a more recent Goldman Sachs report put it closer to
$1.2 trillion.


Big companies will have teams of lawyers to tell them when they
qualify for the tax credits, but there are also billions of
dollars in the IRA that are meant to be spent on vulnerable and
underserved communities. Those communities do not typically have
teams of lawyers.


Who will work to enable them to take full advantage available of
the money? Getting that done will require campaigns,
relationships, and grassroots mobilization. It will require
movement infrastructure.


A relatively new grant-making coalition called Mosaic is
attempting to help build that infrastructure by dispersing money
to the frontline organizations that comprise it. Mosaic is a
cooperative effort among large national environmental groups like
NRDC, big foundations, and various smaller regional, often
BIPOC-led groups.


It has pooled philanthropic money and thus far given almost $11
million of it to dozens of relatively small groups and campaigns
— 85 percent of them BIPOC-led, 87 percent of them female-led —
selected by a governing committee from well over a thousand
applicants. The governing committee contains a super-majority of
representatives from frontline communities; the foundations have
a super-minority.


To discuss the need for movement infrastructure, the Mosaic
effort, and the possibilities IRA offers for frontline
communities, I contacted Dr. Hahrie Han, a professor of political
science at Johns Hopkins University, and David Beckman, one of
the founders of Mosaic and the current president of the Pisces
Foundation. We talked about what movement infrastructure is, the
failure of the climate movement to build enough of it, and
Mosaic’s theory of change.


So, without any further ado, Hahrie Han and David Beckman.
Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.


Hahrie Han


Thanks so much for having us.


David Beckman


Yes, thanks David.


David Roberts


I want to start with you, Hahrie. You have written in the past,
and one of the themes of your work is that social welfare
legislation or policy can often fail to reach, let's say, its
full potential if there isn't the sort of civic and movement
infrastructure around it to help it succeed. So maybe you can
just talk for a little bit about what do we mean by
infrastructure here? What does infrastructure mean? And maybe
also what I think would be helpful is maybe you could cite some
examples of times you think legislation or reforms fell short of
what they could have done because of a lack of infrastructure.


And then maybe some examples of when there was infrastructure and
that was helpful.


Hahrie Han


Yeah, I think that's a great question. There are so many
instances when in trying to tackle some of our stickiest social
problems, we put an enormous amount of attention and effort into
trying to build the coalitions that we need to pass the policies
that we want. If we think about any of the landmark legislation
that we've had in recent decades, from the Affordable Care Act to
the IRA to any other of these big kind of efforts, they've taken
years or decades even to pass because of all the work that it
takes to get them through. But then what so much research and so
much history has taught us is that if there isn't the same kind
of effort that goes into the implementation, that the gains that
we made with policy alone are really fragile.


There's one famous book that looks at some of these gains, these
policy wins, and calls them a "hollow hope" if they're not
accompanied by the kind of infrastructure that you're talking
about. And we just have a lot of those kind of examples
throughout history. So to give a couple of them. For example,
this book, "The Hollow Hope," starts with landmarks court
legislation like Brown v. Board of Education, where, if you
actually look at the ability of that one decision by the Supreme
Court to actually translate into integration on the ground. It
didn't actually achieve its goals, and its actual outcomes felt
really hollow until you saw this mobilization of a lot of the
school districts and parents and communities on the ground to
make real the promises that were in that Supreme Court hearing.


David Roberts


That particular example is kind of telling since that
infrastructure withered a little bit and now those gains are
being reversed. So it's not just a one time thing like sort of
implementing it and making it real is perpetual effort.


Hahrie Han


Yeah, I think that's a great point, right, because the thing that
I always like to remind people is that any policy gains that we
have are really fragile because they can always be reversed on
the one hand, as you point out. But then also because oftentimes
when policy gets implemented, it drifts away from what the
original goals are. There's a famous political scientist, Jacob
Hacker at Yale who looked a lot at basically welfare policy and a
lot of social policies. And what he finds is that if you look at
the impact of those policies on people's lives, that often
there's a big gap between what legislators intended and what
actually happened because of that process of drift.


And that I think is also a really important point because what it
tells us is that you don't need Congress to take another action
to reverse policy gains, but in fact, it can just be ignoring a
process that can lea to that kind of drift.


David Roberts


Entropy, basically. Like if you're not continually reinforcing
it, it naturally will start to erode.


Hahrie Han


Yeah, exactly. That there's just kind of natural chaos in the
system. Or sometimes there are people that are actively working
to undermine the ability to achieve those goals.


David Roberts


Yes.


Hahrie Han


Totally.


David Roberts


And they never quit. And they seem to have great infrastructure.
If I could just insert one of my perpetual gripes in there. Like
infrastructure working against social welfare legislation is just
robust and seemingly permanent.


Hahrie Han


Yeah, it's easier to stop something than to create something new.
And it's also easier to organize people around their prejudices
and to organize people around hope.


David Roberts


Yes, indeed. So what are some examples then of the other side
where sort of the infrastructure has come together around a law
and made it?


Hahrie Han


So one example that I like actually is the Community Reinvestment
Act, which is not a perfect act by any stretch of the
imagination. So I know that there are lots of ways in which we
wouldn't necessarily hold it up as a paragon of legislation.


David Roberts


Can you tell us what that is?


Hahrie Han


Basically, the Community Reinvestment Act was passed essentially
to try to stop redlining in poor and Black communities. And so
when it first began to come out in 1970s, 1980s, a lot of banks
weren't lending to certain communities because they would
literally draw red lines around neighborhoods where they wouldn't
make investments. The Community Reinvestment Act was passed as a
way to try to stop that redlining. One of the things that was
really important that they did in passing the Community
Reinvestment Act is that they essentially created these
mechanisms through which communities could have continual
oversight over the way that banks were acting.


And so the Community Reinvestment Act essentially created these
boards that were an accountability mechanism for banks. And
alongside the Community Reinvestment Act, there was a bill called
the Home Mortgage Data Act. HMDA, it's what it's called for
short. And what HMDA did was it made available the data that
these local communities would need to be able to look in and see
whether or not the banks were making investments in the ways that
they should. So that alone doesn't actually cost government a ton
of money. But by creating that accountability mechanism, what it
did was create this ongoing hook, essentially around which
communities could organize and essentially hold banks
accountable.


And so over time, we've seen trillions of dollars of investments
being driven into lower income communities because of the
Community Reinvestment Act.


David Roberts


And so what do we mean then? I mean, we're talking about
infrastructure here, sort of vaguely. What do we mean concretely
by having the infrastructure in place to make these laws perform
the way we want? What is it comprised of?


Hahrie Han


So, that's that's a complicated question. In my mind, movement
infrastructure has a lot to do with the relationships, with the
structures and the vehicles and the resources that a movement
needs to be able to respond to the kind of strategic challenges
that are going to come its way. And so I think one mistake that
people make a lot in thinking about movements is to think about
the most effective movement as being the one that has the best
plan at the beginning. But actually, what we find is that the
most effective movement is the one that can best respond to the
contingency that comes up that it didn't expect.


And what do you need to respond to contingency? Well, you need to
have strong leaders, good people who are interconnected with each
other. You need to have resources that you can deploy. You need
to have vehicles that can move nimbly and agilely in response to
things that might come up that you don't expect. There are a
range of those kinds of things that I think comprise the movement
infrastructure that enable that response.


David Roberts


David, let's go to you for a second. The Mosaic effort is an
effort to build this kind of infrastructure. So I want to talk
about what that infrastructure is, but let's back up a little
bit. Mosaic is a coalition of all these big, long-time
foundations and big green groups that have come together with the
sort of explicit goal of changing the way environmental
philanthropy is done. So let's start then, with that. What is
wrong with environmental philanthropy? Why does it need to
change? What are its sort of flaws and shortcomings today?


David Beckman


Well, that's a big question, too. Let me just say about Mosaic.
It is really the name hopefully paints a picture of the idea and
the theory, which is that it's not just the big organizations,
but it's all of the organizations and the people, the activists
and the advocates that are individually doing important work but
are not collectively able to keep pace with the extraordinary
challenges and the opponents that you referred to. They can do
better in a more connected fashion. And what's been missing is
the investments in that connectivity and the tools that Hahrie
discussed. And we can talk about what they mean in the context of
the IRA.


But part of the reason that those tools that are so essential to
movement success are missing is because, in the main, big
philanthropy hasn't invested in them. Bridgespan, one of the
leading social sector consultancies, has published a whole report
about how field building, which is another way of looking at
this, is one of the most effective, yet underinvested strategies
in philanthropy. So this is an endemic problem, I think, that has
a lot to do with the fact that infrastructure is so important,
but it's invisible in some sense. It's not vivid. It isn't like
you can't take a picture of the forest that you've saved.


It's the conditions, the how that you get to that result.


David Roberts


Right, it's not obvious also what the metrics are, right? Like,
if you're doing it right or not, it's not clear what you're it's
difficult to measure.


David Beckman


That's right. It's difficult to measure. So your question about
philanthropy, of course there's lots of different philanthropies
and there's more coming on the scene happily every day. But in
the main, big environmental philanthropy funds in an atomistic
way. It funds narrowly. It funds in a way that is exclusive
instead of inclusive, and it tends to concentrate power. So four
aspects that are not well suited to big scale social change and
not well suited to implementing something of the scale of the
IRA. And let me just give you a couple of facts about this. The
atomistic part is really concentrating resources in single
organizations and not building the fields that make them
stronger.


The connections that Hahrie is talking about narrow. In 2018, the
Environmental Grant Makers Association, which is not an
association of every environmental funder, but many of the really
large ones, surveyed its members and found that just 200
nonprofits of the perhaps 15,000 that focused on the environment
got over 50% of the $1.7 billion that its members donated in
2018. And that is astounding, if you think about it, 15,000 or so
registered 501(c)(3)s and 200 are getting half the money. And
that year, five nonprofits got 13% of that $1.7 billion funding
pie. The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife, EDF, and the place I
used to work, NRDC, four of those got $100 million dollar grants
from the Bezos Earth Fund a couple of years later.


So you've got deep concentration. And then BIPOC organizations
are funded at just a fraction between, say, 1% and 10%, depending
on the study you look at. So there's not an inclusive focus. And
last, something we're trying to address with Mosaic, most of the
decisions are made by program officers and boards. Relatively few
people with a certain type of demographic background, usually not
always. And so there isn't much investment in participatory grant
making, which is what we're modeling with Mosaic, where leaders
actually get to compare and to cogenerate strategy and then to
deploy money themselves as opposed to having to ask for it from a
philanthropy.


So atomistic narrow, exclusive and concentrating isn't a recipe
for success in general, and certainly not with respect to the
IRA.


David Roberts


This is so reminiscent like this is a critique of left versus
right philanthropic funding that goes back decades, since I
remember paying attention. It's always the right is investing in
infrastructure, right in the organizations, in the relationships.
Like, you look at the Federalist Society that is basically all
about relationships and look at the tentacles it has sent out
into US society, just remarkably successful. And then you hear
people on the left saying, "I can get a grant for a particular
campaign or a particular accomplishment or a particular policy,
but it's impossible to get just operational funding, just basic
funding for my organization to survive."


And those who do get it, as you say, are so concentrated, and
when a single group gets so much money, it creates this perverse
incentive for the group to sort of put its own interests first,
right, to keep getting the money. So you get almost a resistance
to cooperation and a resistance to working with others.


David Beckman


Yeah. Well, the competition for money I have experienced myself
when I was an advocate and lawyer doing environmental justice
work and water advocacy and the things I did at NRDC, there's no
question that it gets in the way. And part of the problem is
there's not enough money because the organizations I mentioned, I
think, are good organizations. So the issue isn't that they
shouldn't be funded. It's that everyone else needs to be funded,
too. And money needs to flow in ways which are both equitable and
fundamentally effective for large scale social change and
philanthropy in the main.


Not always, but in the main has missed that. And that's a big
problem.


David Roberts


I wanted to ask kind of a practical question about Mosaic. So you
have this grant making board, this representative board that has
a lot of diverse people on it, and you have over 1000 relatively
small scale applicants and what sounds like a really labor
intensive process by which all these applicants are vetted. And
the board discusses them with one another and they're winnowed
down and et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I was reading about this
in The Chronicle of Philanthropy or whatever the heck it's
called, and it just sounds exhausting. People involved were
saying it's exhausting.


It's like finals week all year. And yet the result of that is $11
million, which is, in the context of these small groups,
obviously nothing to shake a stick at. But like Bill Gates, it's
just dropping $100 million here and there on this and that
company. So I'm just asking about, I guess, the ratio of soft
costs of work, of time intensiveness versus the amount of money
that's being deployed. Do you think that's sustainable in the
long run?


David Beckman


Yeah, it's a good question. Well, the good news is that Mosaic is
about to announce $10 million in additional funding. So it's a
new effort that is beta testing a lot of the concepts that we're
talking about and learning along the way. So I've been able to
participate, which is a really interesting experience as somebody
who also spent a decade and a half as an advocate and then runs a
foundation, a private foundation that's in a more traditional
mode. And it's true it takes a lot of time, but I'll tell you, it
takes a lot of time the other way, too.


So it's not really a question so much of how much time, but what
is the quality of the time that's invested. And I think the
benefit of participatory grant making that I see, particularly
when it's done well and leaders are involved, is that it itself
is infrastructure. There are relationships that are formed, ideas
that are exchanged, trust that is built, theories of change that
are debated. And the environmental movement, as you know, both of
you know, is fractious and doesn't always agree with each other.
And so there's a value there that I think is differentially
impactful compared to several program officers or one making
decisions.


Should there be more money in participatory grant making?
Absolutely, and in fact, there's a study that says that just a
fraction of foundations participate in any way with grant making
approaches that devolve power to other people. And I think that's
partly because there's not a lot of good examples of where it's
worked. So hopefully, one of the things that Mosaic and other
efforts can do is to demonstrate the benefit of this approach for
others.


David Roberts


Can you just very briefly describe the approach? It's a committee
and there are meetings. Is there more to it than that?


David Beckman


Yeah, it's just like a meeting, David. There are a couple of
things. First of all, the application process seeks collaborative
proposals. So that in itself is different. Usually, in my
experience, it's like a single NGO approaching a single
foundation. So already, from the beginning, the proposals are
done in a different way. They're done online, they can be done
verbally, which I think is a really good progressive approach.
There's no long 15-page proposal that is required. So that's an
attempt to lower the barriers of entry. And then there's this
fabulous staff that has incredible data crunching capacity, that
looks for heat maps and does some initial vetting.


And then the leadership that makes the decisions is not involved
in all of that. So it's not that everybody's engaged at that
stage. But then we met in for three days and went over, did a
whole kind of retreat, and reviewed the top section of proposals
that the staff had prepared. And that was a debate like some of
the best debates I've been involved as an environmental advocate,
where people are talking about what is needed, where how do you
compose a grant slate that's equitable and effective? How do you
fund the grassroots? How do you fund relationships between the
Big Greens and others, networks and communications and the rest?


So what comes out of it? I think and I can compare because I run
a foundation, I think is a really good way to approach things
that really deserves a place much more solidly in the mainstream
of environmental grant making.


David Roberts


Hahrie from your perch as Mosaic is sifting through all these
applicants, what kinds of things should it be looking for? What
are the ingredients of this sort of movement infrastructure that
you're talking about that you can identify in groups? Are you
looking for certain kind of people, certain kind of strategies,
certain kind of goals or financial structures. How would you go
about building movement infrastructure? What are the sort of
indicators that you're looking for among grantees?


Hahrie Han


It's a great question. So I think that in thinking about movement
infrastructure, in the end what we're trying to do is identify
individuals and organizations that aren't just the kind of
individuals and organizations that can do a thing, but that can
become the kind of people that do what needs to be done, right?
And so this kind of gets back to the idea that when you're
thinking about implementing a bill as large as the IRA or
building a movement as broad as what we need in the environmental
movement, you have to anticipate the fact that there are going to
be challenges coming your way. You can't anticipate.


And so I have to think about who are the kind of people that are
going to be able to respond to that? What are the kind of
organizations that can respond to that? And so then how do I
actually think about and identify that at time one without
knowing what the challenges are that they're going to be
investing in time two?


David Roberts


Yeah, exactly.


Hahrie Han


The things that would look for would be things like what is the
extent to which they're building networks among their people that
are bridging versus just bonding. And so the idea of a bonding
network is one in which people are connected to other people who
are a lot like them. Bridging networks are ones that not only
create those bonds, but also enable people to bridge across to
different kinds of people who aren't necessarily like them. And
so what that means is that you have an organization that's
constantly growing and renewing itself. I would look for
organizations that are investing in building a kind of inclusive
leadership in the way that David was describing, partly because I
think obviously there are moral reasons why we would want to make
sure that we have an inclusive leadership, but partly also for
strategic reasons.


There's a lot of research that shows that the movements that can
best anticipate and respond to contingency this is true not only
for movements, but actually for corporations as well are ones
that have lots of different kind of for lack of a better word,
kind of sensors out in the community to sort of understand what
are the changes that are coming our way and how do we figure out
how we can anticipate, how we need to remake ourselves for the
future. And so if you don't have that kind of diversity of people
giving you input, then you're not able to respond nimbly to the
constantly changing world around you. So there are a lot of
things like that that I think begin to give us a sense.


David Roberts


Yeah, I think this is such an important point and maybe I'll
touch that back to you also, David, because I feel like and I've
done a couple of pods on this recently, been thinking about it
recently and this idea of trying to fund a more diverse give
money to more diverse groups and et cetera. It's so often framed
in terms of sort of representation as kind of an end in itself,
like a moral good in itself. It's just good to have other people
there because you want to check the box. But the point of all
this and this is the point that comes across in management
literature and all this is not just that it's good, but that
diverse groups make better decisions.


It's an improvement in your ability to do good things. It's not
just for looks or not just for box checking. It makes you perform
better. And I wonder David, if you've you know now that you've
really gotten your hands dirty trying to assemble a group like
this, I wonder your thoughts on that, if you found that to be the
case.


David Beckman


Absolutely. And I would just to add to what you said a second ago
for many grant makers, again, not all, but I see and hear a lot
that makes me think that equitable grant making for some is their
charity, not their strategy.


David Roberts


Right. Yes.


David Beckman


And there's a big difference. There's a big difference. There's
certainly a moral imperative to fund communities and people who
have more than their fair share of problems and who have been
deprived of money from big institutional funders historically. So
that stands on its own. But the point you're making is not only I
think about the fact that better, more creative and interesting
solutions come up which do, but that you can build power that
way. As Hahrie's pointing out by bridging between what could be
sort of atomistic, semi-competitive or worse, communities within
a movement and to find some sort of working relationships, if not
stronger relationships, productive relationships that allow big,
important social change to happen.


And that I think is one of the most important things that's
missed when we pick fractions within a movement, either the Big
Greens if you're talking about the environmental movement or
frontline organizations, I think both can play a role and they
can play a synergistic role when their collective impact is built
on some relationship. And sometimes that isn't that we're going
to totally agree, it's not kumbaya, let's all get along. It's
that often when you're in relationship and you're in those rooms
you can find that you might disagree about two or three things
and maybe those are not going to get resolved but there's three
or four things that you can agree on and through that kind of
doorway you can make progress that you couldn't make otherwise.
And that's why some of the effort in answering the question you
asked earlier I think is worth it because it's not just process
or overhead, it is actually the work, it is actually the
infrastructure.


David Roberts


Another question for you Hahrie is about backing up from the
implementation, just the legislation itself. It seems to me like
not only should environmental philanthropists be thinking in
terms of infrastructure and implementation, but obviously
legislators should too. Like, you can do better or worse in the
text of a law on those terms. And this is something I feel like
this is another critique of Democrats that goes way back, which
is that they don't lose well, right? Like they don't lose in a
way that improves their chances the next time. And even when they
do pass legislation, it's not like always part of the goal of the
legislation should be to make future reforms easier, to make
future reforms more likely.


So I wonder, a. do you see anything in the IRA that qualifies as
kind of that like an eye on infrastructure building?


Hahrie Han


Right.


David Roberts


And if not, what would you like to see, like, in future
legislation? What are the sorts of things you might put in
legislation that would help this infrastructure building?


Hahrie Han


Yeah. I think it's so important in designing policy to think
about what the feedback effects that you're creating, because a
lot of the most effective policies that we've seen throughout
history are ones that have these feedback effects that
essentially what you want to do is create a feedback effect that
strengthens the constituencies that you want to strengthen and
then either weakens or divides the opponents to the bill, right.
And that's how you create the kind of loops that you're talking
about that enable the passage of the next set of reforms, make
them even more likely than they were before with the IRA.


I think the opportunity that's on the table is the fact that so
much of this money is essentially being delegated out through
state agencies and other local governmental agencies that are
operating at many different levels of government. And the extent
to which this money can be doled out in a way that builds what I
like to think of as relational state capacity, right. The ability
of these governments to co govern and work in partnership with
community leaders and community groups on the ground that only
then makes the next generation of reform and policy and funding
and implementation that much stronger.


And so I feel like a lot of the design questions that we have on
the table right now about how this money gets allocated through
this network of state and local agencies and other intermediaries
is going to be really important in helping determine the extent
to which we have those kind of feedback loops or not.


David Roberts


Yeah. And something I've actually heard from people in the back
rooms involved in building IRA is that among Democrats in
Congress, there's been a learning, let's say, that you don't
necessarily want to channel all your money through state
governments, right. Because there are a lot of perverse state
governments who will do things like refusing billions of dollars
of free. Federal money so that they can keep their poor people
from having health care, that kind of thing, right. Like they've
learned from the past that you can't rely on. So a lot of the IRA
is sort of built around the idea of going straight to
communities, straight to local communities, which I thought is
heartening that the Democratic establishment is learning things.


Hahrie Han


Right, yeah. And it's heartening, partly because it's learning
how to play that political game, right. But also heartening
because then that implicitly builds this capacity and these
capabilities in these local communities in a way that can have
greater effects down the road.


David Beckman


Yeah. And if I could just add to that, just to connect something
we've been talking about. So what does it look like to make a
grant on movement infrastructure? A couple of the grants that
Mosaic is making this year focus on a really bridging network of
17,000 plus climate advocates, policymakers, academics. It's just
connecting that group. Another grant is facilitating rural
implementation and trying to create networks that make it easier
for folks who may not be as commonly working in the areas of
electrification and tax incentives and so forth to pry those
opportunities. And there's another grant that's actually focused
on government officials themselves and educating them about the
opportunity, not in environmental terms, even necessarily, but in
terms of what they can do for their communities.


So those are ways of sort of spurring the kind of relationships
that Hahrie is talking about.


David Roberts


From where you're sitting here. So you got a bird's eye view of
dozens and dozens and dozens of small groups who want money. So I
wonder part of shifting funding from a couple of big groups to a
wide variety of small groups is about just sort of like hedging
your bets and building infrastructure. But I wonder if you found
among the applicants just ideas and strategies that are not
represented among the big groups. In other words, like genuinely
new ideas for how to approach things. I wonder if you could just
talk about some of the applications and the patterns that
emerged.


David Beckman


Well, one of the things that's amazing is that it's such a
diverse set of ideas. And from a philanthropic practice
perspective, when you're not relying on a single individual to
vet potential proposals, I mean, nobody knows everybody, and
everybody's got a limit to their day. You just get an eye-opening
kind of response. And I think that was something that everybody
CEOs of big groups are part of Mosaic CEOs of smaller groups, EJ
groups, felt. So some of what we saw is a desire to sort of shift
the terms of debate. And I don't know how that, I don't think, is
very well-funded in mainstream environmental philanthropy.


Different theories of change, different approaches to the
economy, questions around how to frame economic growth in
different ways, indigenous perspectives on the protection of the
environment and elevating the rights of nature. As a theory,
these are not directly related to a tax incentive for
decarbonizing your house, but they come through and they're
interesting perspectives that don't get a lot of play. More
practically, we saw a lot of really interesting collaborations
between different organizations, some of which work together,
some of which don't, and are using the opportunity to apply for a
collaborative grant to stretch their wings in ways which, as
Hahrie saying, may grow into something that has nothing to do
with the proposal before us. One interesting proposal was to
build solar capacity in communities of color using the tax
incentives and actually, I think, direct grants that are
available for solar installation, not only generally, but in
underserved communities to turn that into a workforce development
effort for brown and black people.


So there's a whole set of things that I think are going to be
helpful in actually reaching the goals of the IRA which are not
guaranteed to happen and can build for the future.


David Roberts


One other question I wanted to ask in terms of what was on your
mind as you're picking grantees is, and this is anyone who
listens to the pod will know that this is an enduring obsession
of mine. But it seems like one of the basic headwinds facing
implementation of the IRA, facing basically any progressive
effort, is this massive, extremely well developed propaganda
apparatus on the other side that has basically captured rural
America, has almost entirely captured rural America. And in a
sense, like any attempt to do anything reality based in the face
of that just gets swamped. So I wonder if there were a lot of
ideas among the applicants about, to put it dramatically,
information warfare about how to fight back against what is the
inevitable tide of misinformation about this bill, about these
technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Was that a theme?


David Beckman


Yes, but maybe in a more positive sense that the IRA, I think to
the credit of its designers, is itself a pretty profound attempt
to push back on that narrative. But because really what we're
talking about is decarbonization in theory, but the practice of
it is through electrification of power and cars and incentives
for clean energy and right down to what any of us, as people who
live in a home could get a credit or a refund for purchasing like
a heat pump. And there is, in the IRA, specific money that goes
both to vulnerable communities, EJ communities, as well as to
rural communities, which there are 40 million people in the US
who live in rural communities, 50% of the land mass of the
country.


And so we're talking about a significant space in the country and
a lot of people. The opportunity, for example, to decarbonize
rural electrical cooperatives which have really relied on coal,
which has very significant public health impacts, in addition, is
a huge opportunity that isn't necessarily cloaked in
environmental terms. It's a great opportunity to reduce cost and
to create jobs. And there's a whole set of parts of the IRA that
are entirely focused on farm communities and forest communities
that involve credits and other types of incentives for
regenerative agriculture, for dealing with water scarcity,
increasing water scarcity, and things that just have basic bottom
line benefits economically and are part of cleaning up and making
the economy greener in those areas.


So I see those set asides, or those components, set asides is
probably not the right word, for environmental justice and for
rural communities as a really powerful step. And I think it
connects a lot to what Hahrie is talking about in terms of will
this change the experience of people who might think of
environmental groups as not their friend and really
recontextualize what this is about.


Hahrie Han


And if I can chime in here just on the question of disinformation
that is spreading in so many of our communities and especially in
a lot of these rural communities. I've been doing a lot of work
recently studying evangelical communities which operate in a
variety of different kinds of contexts. But one of the things
I've really learned from the way a lot of evangelical churches
organize their communities is they have this idea that belonging
comes before belief. That so often, I think, when we think about
building an environmental movement, there's sort of this implicit
assumption that belief comes before belonging, right?


Like that you've got to sign on to this idea that we all need to
decarbonize before we're going to invite you into our meetings.
And if you show up in your Range Rover and your hunting gear,
maybe you're not going to feel as welcome as you do otherwise.
And these churches have the very opposite idea where they say,
look, you don't have to believe in God. You don't have to believe
in any God, and especially our God. We're not going to be shy
about what we stand for, but you're a part of us no matter what.


And they have this attitude of radical hospitality. And that's
really undergirded by a lot of research that we have on
disinformation, where when you're trying to combat that kind of
propaganda, the least effective thing you can do is throw a lot
of scientific evidence at someone who ...


David Roberts


Fact sheets.


Hahrie Han


Right. But the best thing that you can do is have someone who
they trust, with whom they feel this sense of belonging, come and
talk to them and present an alternative narrative. And so, in
that sense, I feel like a lot of the work that Mosaic is doing in
investing in these community based organizations that can build
those communities of belonging in rural areas across America is
another really important piece of combating this kind of
disinformation.


David Roberts


Yeah, I think that's such an important point. I mean, you have
results that support this basic conclusion from sociology, from
neurology, name your field. It all is coming together to
basically show that social relationships are primary and very
often your beliefs are derived from those rather than vice versa,
as you're saying. This is also a long-time criticism of the left
and this is sort of conventional wisdom at this point. Unions
were sort of the left's tool. Unions and liberal churches were
the left's tool for doing that, just for literally bringing
people together in the same room so they can see and smell one
another and share beers.


And that stuff is so important. And unions have withered
notoriously and liberal churches have kind of withered and the
left has nothing to replace them. So in that sense, I think it's
just great to be funding these super basic, just like get in a
room together, group type things.


David Beckman


And if I could just say, one of the challenges practically with
the Hahrie's talking about radical hospitality is that let's just
say that the federal government doesn't come with radical
hospitality even if it's offering billions of dollars that can be
used. So breaking that down, how do you apply for money? How do
you even track? I'm a lawyer. I have difficulty with the Federal
Register and I was trained and supposedly I'm supposed to be
competent in that. And a lot of the investments that we're making
and others I think hopefully will be too, is about creating some
basic kind of open doorways that make the opportunities
accessible and relatable when they are not, in any of our lives
necessarily top of mind.


We're also supporting faith communities through Mosaic and
veterans who are trying to organize around climate change and
other new or newer voices, nurses and healthcare professionals
who I think reflect some of the experience and the research that
Hahrie is talking about where it's a lot better to have somebody
who you trust, who is in relationship with you, talk to you about
an issue that you might not hear. The same if it's sort of an
environmental leader on television or something like that.


David Roberts


Yeah. And this is to Hahrie's earlier point. Once that
relationship is established, it works for the next thing too,
right?


David Beckman


Yeah.


David Roberts


That's, I guess, what we mean by infrastructure. Like, once it's
there, it's built and it operates beyond the immediate context.
Hahrie, I wonder one sort of question I had is a lot of the money
in the IRA is just for very practical, prosaic stuff machines,
retrofits, whatever. And so most of the attention around all this
is sort of building these networks, building this infrastructure
to allow people to access that money. But I wonder if you've
given any thought or David, I'd be interested to hear your
thoughts on this too, is whether the money itself can be spent in
such a way as to serve this goal.


Spent in such a way as to encourage infrastructure. You know, not
only sort of trying to get the money, but trying to direct the
money in ways that are reinforcing of this larger goal.


Hahrie Han


You know, one thing that I think about is this question of what
are the mechanisms of accountability that are being created
through the way the IRA gets deployed? Because ultimately that
question of accountability is the one that's going to determine
the extent to which these ongoing feedback loops are created in
the ways that would favor ongoing reform or not. And so as all
this money is being deployed for heat pumps or other basic
machines that are needed to help decarbonize the entire economy,
I think it's not just about spending that money once, right, but
it's about restructuring the way the economy works in these
certain kind of communities. And how can that be done in a way
that will continue to ensure that the kinds of voices that we
want at the table are continually there and that those voices are
strengthened through the development of this whole new system?


David Beckman


Yeah, two thoughts on that. One, that a very kind of visual thing
came to mind because there's a part of the IRA that is focused on
environmental justice and on transportation projects in the that
literally physically split communities, usually Brown or Black
communities. And the opportunity actually to reconnect is quite a
beautiful visual metaphor for what you're asking about and I
think would almost naturally create the opportunities for
communities to rediscover their connections in ways that have
been literally physically severed by decisions. But beyond that,
and more broadly, I think this is where advocates activists come
into play because I think a couple of possibilities are out
there.


One is that the IRA is successful, but the experience of
individuals and even companies is very solitary. I go to Home
Depot, I get something from my house that costs less, or I can
fill out a form and get a rebate check from somebody. That's a
solitary experience. It may be very marginal in terms of
anybody's psychological thinking about these issues, but if
environmental organizations or those that are interested in these
issues are able to surround those sorts of economic activities
with new connection opportunities, information that as Hahrie
says it is relatable where trusted messengers are delivering it.


So that act of participating in the IRA's opportunities is also
an act of stepping forward and opening yourself up to, well, you
know what? That heat pump actually performs better than what I
had before. Maybe some of these environmental ideas aren't so
crazy. That's where you get chess not checkers. And that's so
essential that activists and advocates working on climate really
seize this opportunity to work dimensionally around these
opportunities. Because if they don't, I think we could have a
different level of success, but not something that would be as
systemically transformational as is possible.


David Roberts


Right, yeah, I think about the analogy in fitness or weight loss,
one of the sort of most common forms of advice now is find a
group or a community or even just another person and make your
goals public like put your goals out there and then be sort of
accountable to that other person. Or I think about the
conversation about game-ifying things. Just sort of like make
things that are solitary social in some way, where you get social
reward or social feedback or you have social accountability. A.,
that's good for you to have those networks, but also, like,
you're just more likely to do those individual things if you have
some social network that they're involved in.


And your answer made me think of how you would think about doing
that with IRA, right? Like somehow making the act of going to get
your heat pump social in some ways so that it brings some
feedback or accountability or so it weaves you more into some
sort of group setting.


David Beckman


Right, that's the play. That's the thing to do. And that can make
a huge difference. Ask can organizing around money that is not
actually available to individuals but is going to so many parts
of the economy that impact people directly? Like ports, there's
$3 billion for ports and $3 billion for reconnecting communities,
I mentioned that a minute ago. And on and on. And that involves
influencing government actors, as Hahrie was pointing out
earlier, both to take advantage of the opportunities and then to
do so well to propose projects that are going to make a
difference. That's a classic organizing opportunity.


David Roberts


And of course, if you have the infrastructure in place, you can
reward politicians who do the good thing, thereby showing the
other politicians that there's positive feedback to be had in
this direction.


David Beckman


Yeah.


David Roberts


David, one more question for you, which is slightly prosaic, but
I have been thinking about it a lot, which is just this sort of
initial round of throwing open the gates of environmental
philanthropy money to this much wider variety of participants,
smaller groups, et cetera, et cetera. In a sense, the initial
rush of it is like a sugar high. Like it's great, I think
everybody's excited. But over time you do need the foundation's
obsession with metrics and accountability, I think we can all
agree, has maybe sometimes gone overboard and results in a lot of
paperwork and a lot of unnecessary difficulty and gatekeeping.


But those needs are not made up, right? So are there any sort of
performance metrics or what does accountability look like when
you're moving into this kind of fuzzier relational stuff? What
would it take for a grantee to lose their funding? What do you
have in place in terms of accountability? Or have you thought
about that a lot?


David Beckman


Well, it's a good question and it's a question, I think that
people in philanthropy and people who are looking for money think
about a lot. The baselines, I think, are important, what's the
context in which we're operating and a lot of the there's kind of
basic due diligence that an organization is a 501(c)(3) and so
forth and so on. But beyond that, whether it's a Mosaic context
or a more traditional foundation. A lot of the metrics are
artificially simplified, and they become, at times, bean counting
operations. And I know this because I used to propose those to
foundations when I was doing advocacy.


David Roberts


It's easier, right? I mean, one of the things about it, it's very
easy if you have a simple marker.


David Beckman


Right, I'm going to write a report, and then I can send the
report to the funder and say, look, I wrote a report, and if I'm
lucky, I got on David's podcast, so I got brought attention to
it. And I'm not suggesting that those things don't make a
difference. I used to write reports, and I think they can make a
difference in the right circumstances. So the question becomes,
what are we comparing to? And I think where we are right now is
sort of a bit of an artifice. Having said that, you can evaluate
and learn from movement building just as you can grants, just as
you can from any other.


You just need a much more relational touch. And I would ask
Hahrie might want to jump in on this because she's looked so
carefully at the types of outcomes that occur. And I think the
outcomes that we're looking for, we're looking to be patient
funding. We're looking to recognize that we're not going to
necessarily see some sort of vivid and tangible, like ribbon
cutting, in a year, and that we're not really asking people to
propose things to us which we know as a collective. Making
decisions from the advocacy community, from the field, are simply
unrealistic. So I think one of the most important things to do is
to recognize that if we're going to build resilient
organizations, that that in itself is the outcome we're looking
for, as opposed to some sort of simplified, kind of artificially
linear, kind of gantt chart that we can say was met or wasn't
met.


Hahrie Han


I totally agree with what David was saying. And an analogy that I
use sometimes in thinking about this is the idea that in the
corporate world, in the for-profit world, we invest in companies
all the time based on their assets, right? And that I would be
foolish, in fact, as an investor, if I only evaluated a company's
profits in the prior year and didn't look at their assets going
forward, that I should, in fact, be really making judgments based
on what they can do in the future. And I think in the same way,
for movements, a lot of philanthropy, I think, tend to only hold
movements accountable for the equivalent of their, quote unquote
"profits."


But really, what they should be investing in is what those assets
are going forward. And I think one of the things that's really
exciting about what Mosaic is doing is trying to strengthen those
assets and then continually invest in them over time.


David Beckman


Yeah. One, just as a quick vignette, we've been doing this only a
couple of years but it's long enough now to start hearing from
grantees who themselves report in excited tones how amazing it is
from their perspective to be able to get funding for things that
would simply not even be possible in other contexts. And what it
means if you're a small hub for advocacy in appalachia to have
some communications money or to have some of the things that
maybe the larger organizations just take for granted. And we're
going to be developing a lot of that information because I think
you're onto something, David.


That mainstream philanthropy. To move hundreds of millions and
billions in these directions is what we need to do. And that
we're not going to be able entirely to tell people just to trust
us, that we have to meet folks where they are and focus on
developing sort of a comfort and a conversance with what we're
attempting to do here.


David Roberts


What about and I guess I throw this one to both of you too. We're
so behind the eight ball on climate change and a lot of other
environmental problems that a lot of solutions are relatively
obvious. Like, a lot of the things that need to be done are
relatively obvious and uncontroversial. But you can sort of
imagine different demographics coming at this from different
places having some pretty fundamental disagreements about the
theory of change or even sort of what kind of society we're
shooting for. There's sort of a climate socialist left and then
there's like a very sort of establishment center-left kind of big
environmental group.


And there are real philosophical and ideological disagreements.
And I wonder just how do you deal with those when they can we
find enough in common that they can be kind of papered over and
we can move forward together? Or do you worry about those
emerging in a more enduring way?


David Beckman


Well, I mean, as you know, David and Hahrie those cleavages have
already emerged in enviornmental advocacy. And I think we're in
the midst of a reckoning about how larger organizations have
operated, how big philanthropy operates the role of a just
transition versus simply looking for tons of reduction. Part of
Mosaic's, kind of, birth came not from me but from 18 months of
really cogentive development with 100 different leaders that
really looked at those questions. I think as much as
infrastructure is important intangible ways as Hahrie is
emphasizing, the relational components are essential. And they
don't resolve every question whether you're in business or you're
in sports or whatever you're doing in life, your own
relationships.


The fundamental question isn't whether people can truly agree on
every last detail. It's whether they can form more productive
relationships in the advocacy work they're doing. That's the
goal. And if you can make an advocacy community of 15,000
organizations like 10% better that is a net effective investment
that's huge in terms of its outcome. So we're having these
conversations as part of Mosaic and they're going on across the
field. And the question is, where do you build the infrastructure
to have them in ways that are reperative? One of the focuses of
Mosaic is about relationships and trust.


And some people look at that when we show a PowerPoint. They're
like relationships and trust. What does that have to do with the
environment or climate? Well, actually ...


David Roberts


It has everything has everything to do with everything.


David Beckman


That's right. But it's not a commonly you can look at a lot of
foundation websites before you're going to find relationships and
trust.


Hahrie Han


Difference and disagreement is inherent to any kind of
collaborative effort, especially one at the scale, though, that
we're talking about. And I think the idea that we're going to be
able to either paper over or ignore those differences or get
everyone to just get along sometimes feels like it's a
frustrating way to approach the problem. And what we know from a
lot of previous experiences and research and so on, is that what
makes it possible for these kind of coalitions to navigate those
kind of deep strategic differences like the ones you're
describing about? Is the extent to which they create equitable
power sharing agreements so that the super left-y groups and the
center-left groups can kind of have the sense that we know we're
not going to all agree on everything in the end, but we're going
to be really clear about how we're going to make decisions
together, about what we're going to do and how we're going to
allocate resources.


David Roberts


We're going to be heard, right. So often it's just about that as
much as anything else.


Hahrie Han


Right, and so having a participatory board where there's this
transparent governance process just kind of starts to create
those habits of learning how to share power across lots of
different theories of change.


David Roberts


I think that working together in person or like face to face
often shows people that despite our differences, there is
actually a time we can work together on there and we do have more
in common than we thought. Whereas the common communicative
environment these days of social media is more or less structured
to have the opposite effect, right, to sort of exaggerate
differences and to encourage people to dig in and be the most
extreme version of their selves. So anything that works against
that is a social good in my book.


Hahrie Han


Yeah. I think that sometimes we mistake attention for power. And
part of why social media can be so alluring is because it gets
you lots of attention and the more divisive you are, the more
attention you get. But to actually build power, you have to build
those kind of bridges. And so what we have to do is kind of break
that idea that having more attention is necessarily the same as
having power.


David Beckman


Yeah. And I'll just say quickly that Mosaic launched into the
teeth of the pandemic and we've made far more progress when we
were able to actually meet together. It's a very different thing
to look at somebody through. Effectively, whether it's your
handheld screen or a screen on your desk, tends to reinforce the
sort of archness that people can bring into a room where there
are diverse perspectives, but there's nothing like the in-person
meetings and even the socialization between people who don't know
each other just to create a little bit of grace between them.


David Roberts


A final question that I'd like to hear you both weigh on, which
is very general, but just this shift in approach that Mosaic sort
of represents, of focusing on movement infrastructure, focusing
on relationships and just sort of infrastructure building and
having a much more diverse, pluralistic decision making
structure, sharing power, all this kind of stuff. Very much for
reasons we've discussed. Tax against a lot of the sort of trends
and tendencies on the left in the past few decades. What's the
theory of change here? What would you like to see if this catches
on? Like, you know, in a positive world where this new strategy
catches on?


What would you like to see in, like, five to ten years? What can
you imagine improving? What is the sort of theory of change here
if this new approach takes over? What do you think is possible in
the next five to ten years?


Hahrie Han


My mind goes back to the point that you were making, David,
earlier, which is that there's been this long standing pattern
where it feels like the right invests in the kind of deep work
that is needed to make large scale shifts in society and
politics. And the left feels like it's swimming along in the
shallow end all along the way. And we're in a moment right now
where clearly the change that we need is deep and not shallow,
and it's got to operate quickly and also in the long term. And so
for me, it's like when you build this kind of infrastructure and
mechanisms like Mosaic, what I would love to see in five years,
ten years, is a kind of deepening of the movements and the
network of organizations that are able to continually advance the
kind of agenda that we really need.


And so you can think back to the early decades of the rise of a
lot of the kind of organizations that comprise the right. They
sort of started at the same place that we are now, in a way, and
steadily built over a couple of decades. That kind of death that
is now being deployed.


David Beckman


Yeah. And I'll just build on that. I think, from a very practical
sense, the conversation we're having today is about profound
existential challenges that we're facing with climate change and
beyond. I hold, as somebody who's devoted my professional life to
this, both real pride in our grantees and the work that's being
done. Where would we be without the laws that we've got and the
work that's. Been done. And at the same time, this recognition
that so many have that notwithstanding our best efforts, that
those efforts aren't adding up to keep pace with the scale of the
change that we're facing.


And so, very practically, Mosaic and things like it, if it can be
a model, is designed to create a more powerful and effective
environmental movement that can effectuate the big change that we
need. Not just theorize about it, not just plan for it, not just
write about it, but actually implement it at scale and over the
time period that's available to us, which, with climate, is not
that long, by 2030. That's what we need to be focused on, and
that's what Mosaic and things like we've been talking about today
are really directed toward.


David Roberts


A positive note to wrap up on. Hahrie Han, David Beckman, thank
you so much for coming on and talking through all this stuff, and
good luck with your efforts.


David Beckman


Thanks so much.


Hahrie Han


Thank you for having me.


David Roberts


Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free,
powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value
conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts
subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can
continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you
next time.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other
subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
www.volts.wtf/subscribe