History.

We begin this story in retrospect, in 2012.

By then, Mozaik Foundation had been working for more than a decade and 2012 was one of the most stable years in our history. We were building local communities across Bosnia and Herzegovina by providing financial and advisory support to citizen-led initiatives serving the public good.

Our work focused on social cohesion, helping people organise collective action, mobilise local resources and address problems in their own communities.

That year alone, through Mozaik YouthBanks, we supported 326 community projects, while our network of local partners and volunteers continued to grow.

We had already launched our own social-impact businesses and gained important experience in the market. The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, in connection with the World Economic Forum, had also recognised our Director as Regional Social Entrepreneur of the Year for Central and Eastern Europe.

At the same time, Mozaik teams were implementing several major multi-year projects funded by organisations including USAID, the European Union, the World Bank and others.

By conventional measures, things were going well.

But we had started asking a harder question.

We had many reasons to be proud of our work.

Yet we increasingly felt that continuing in the same way would not create the change Bosnia and Herzegovina needed.

Despite major efforts by domestic and international institutions and organisations, including our own, the country was falling further behind the region in economic development and EU integration.

We decided we had to become much better at understanding our actual impact.

In October 2012, we organised our first major strategic meeting to assess honestly what difference Mozaik Foundation was making in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It took place only weeks after our Director returned from an executive programme at Harvard Business School. Over the following three days, he shared what he had learned at Harvard and elsewhere, and the entire team became involved in intensive strategic discussions.

Those discussions soon became a regular practice.

General operating support from the C.S. Mott Foundation gave us something particularly valuable: the time and freedom to step away from daily implementation several times a year and ask two simple questions:

Why do we exist?

What measurable, positive impact can we realistically create in our country and region?

We began designing a new ten-year strategy.

We researched, debated, analysed, tested assumptions and revised our thinking. Wherever possible, we tested elements of the emerging strategy in real life before making them part of the model.

By the end of 2014, we had developed the impact statement that would guide our next decade:

“Between 2016 and 2026, Mozaik Foundation will lead the development of a new generation of entrepreneurial young people, a moral force that creates new social and economic value and new Jobs, and serves as a role model for other young people.”

Once we were clear about why we existed and what impact we wanted to achieve, we critically reviewed every programme we were implementing.

Mozaik YouthBanks emerged as one of the strongest elements of the new strategy.

Projects that did not directly contribute to the intended impact were gradually completed and not renewed.

Mozaik YouthBanks themselves also evolved. We increasingly focused on building young people's Skills and attitudes, radical transparency and transferring real decision-making responsibility to young people and local communities.

But we also knew that YouthBanks alone could not provide the full pathway young people needed for professional development.

We therefore began building complementary multi-year programmes and partnerships across sectors.

The lonac.pro community, today Rolify, Mozaik Startup Studio and later Tech4Impact grew out of this logic.

Together, these programmes created a pathway from first experiences and responsibility in local communities toward professional development, entrepreneurship, businesses and opportunities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and international markets.

The idea was becoming clearer:

young people's development could not stop with one project or one grant.

It needed a System.

The strategic process also produced a new impact-management matrix.

The approach attracted interest from donors and academic institutions, including the Bosch Foundation and Harvard Business School.

In 2014, Deloitte's D2i programme decided to support Mozaik Foundation's ten-year impact strategy.

D2i provided pro bono expertise on key elements of the strategy and gave our team access to contemporary approaches and solutions being used elsewhere in the world.

This helped us complete the strategy with clear indicators for both results and long-term impact.

It also reinforced a discipline that remains central to Mozaik today:

if we cannot define the result and measure whether it happened, we should question why we are doing the work.

Moving away from our old project model created an unexpected problem.

Fundraising became harder.

We needed financial partners willing to support an innovative and relatively high-risk strategy before we had enough evidence that it would work.

We applied for funding opportunities that explicitly called for innovation. We invested significant time in ambitious proposals.

And we failed.

At that stage, major donors were being asked to finance a model we could describe, but could not yet prove.

Fundraising failures quickly created liquidity pressure. Uncertainty increased, stress grew and staff turnover followed.

We eventually faced a fundamental choice.

We could return to a conventional project-based approach, which was easier to fund, but risk abandoning the strategy and losing key members of the team.

Or we could stay with the strategy and risk the possibility that Mozaik Foundation itself might not survive.

We chose the strategy.

We knew why we existed, and we believed innovation was the only credible path to the scale of change we wanted to achieve.

To survive, we concentrated on building long-term partnerships with private foundations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and internationally.

Gradually, that network grew.

Long-term general support from the C.S. Mott Foundation, funding from 32 municipalities and cities, and partnerships with UniCredit Foundation, ZEIT Foundation, Porticus, the European Fund for Southeast Europe, Bosch Foundation and others enabled us to continue.

The struggle to survive while remaining committed to a ten-year strategy shaped the organisation Mozaik Foundation is today.

It forced us to innovate.

It made us more deeply rooted in the communities where we work.

And it taught us to build partnerships across the private, public and civil-society sectors rather than depend on one institution or funding model.

It also helped create an organisational culture in which lessons from implementation are fed rapidly back into strategy.

We embraced digitalisation and moved toward paperless operations even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which helped us adapt quickly when the crisis arrived.

One phrase became common inside Mozaik:

“Change is the only constant.”

That reflects a deliberate commitment to continuous improvement, new methodologies, learning and collective reflection.

During the 2016-2026 strategic cycle, our partnerships continued to expand and the System became stronger.

Internationally, we remained engaged with networks and organisations including Deloitte D2i, the World Economic Forum and Schwab Foundation, Philea and Impact Europe.

We also contributed to the creation of the Philanthropy Forum in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Catalyst 2030.

The lesson from this period was simple:

resilience is not the ability to avoid change. It is the ability to keep learning while staying clear about why you exist.

As the ten-year strategy approached its conclusion, Mozaik Foundation was no longer the same organisation.

We had learned that meaningful change requires an institutional framework capable of handling growth, transparency, investment and partnerships across sectors.

The lessons from the “Valley of Death” led us to a clear conclusion:

we needed to be as rigorous in governance as we were ambitious in innovation.

During 2023 and 2024, within the second phase of the Youth for Change programme supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), we began a major governance reform.

The Board of Directors expanded from three to five members.

Mozaik Foundation's Statute was revised to reflect the governance requirements of an organisation managing significant budgets and public Trust.

In January 2025, the Ministry of Justice of Bosnia and Herzegovina finalised the statutory changes, creating the formal basis for what followed.

In February 2025, guidelines for managing risks in private-sector partnerships were adopted.

In June and July 2025, the Board adopted Mozaik Foundation's Investment Policy, covering investment instruments, exclusion criteria, ESG screening, PEP screening and decision-making rules.

The purpose was clear: investment activity needed the same discipline, accountability and transparency as the rest of the organisation.

In August 2025, Tech4Impact d.o.o. Sarajevo was established as Mozaik Foundation's investment company.

Mozaik Foundation retained majority ownership, while a private co-investor contributed additional capital and market discipline.