An introduction to… MOSAIC!
MOSAIC CONSORTIUM - October 2023 project kickoff meeting, Ghent
We are MOSAIC, a consortium of 20 organisations, comprising more than 50 researchers and practitioners. Striving to add our piece to the ‘mosaic’, as a consortium we aim to better understand why people value the environment but still take actions that harm it. We’ll be producing and sharing actionable insights that are practical and can help counter harmful practices that threaten our fragile ecosystem.
Kicking off a new European project can feel daunting for many participants: new partners; new concepts; new scientific challenges; all on top of still defining the shape your role and the project will take. At proposal stage, all European projects start out as simplified models built with external evaluation in mind. A project kick-off meeting is the first proper opportunity to delve in more deeply, unpack high-level models and gain a collective understanding of the nuts and bolts of everything. Often, kick-off meetings end up raising more questions than they answer. Fortunately, sustainable land use researchers and practitioners are good at keeping their cool with nasty questions and don’t panic when faced with uncertainty.
Our goal for MOSAIC is clear. The MOSAIC proposal provides an outline of the tasks we’ll be doing, the organisations contributing to them and how they all inform each other. However, we know that projects are brought to life and executed by people, not just organisations and work packages. We value the intrinsic ambitions and motivations of the individuals in our vast team and aim to embed them in our overall project objectives. I see it as my task to make sure this exchange between ‘people’ and ‘project’ happens; I will do my utmost to provide the necessary ‘substrates’ to help them symbiotically thrive together.
For me, the kick-off meeting was all about getting to know everyone we’ll be working with for the next 4.5 years and creating a comfortable environment to thrive in together. As an amateur mycologist and big fan of Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life – How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures (2020), I see the people making up MOSAIC as mycelia. First, they’ll meet each other, then they’ll exchange resources and information. In doing so, they’ll realise their personal objectives and get key jobs done, while also contributing to something bigger: a robust MOSAIC ecosystem with plants and animals. And we all know that ecosystems can’t thrive without fungi…
Jeremy Lent (The Patterning Instinct, The Web of Meaning) has taught me the importance of using metaphors. His work has inspired my use of metaphors from the natural world, which I hope will deepen our connections and collaboration and lead to transformative change. I plan to use fungi metaphors as a nature-based solution to achieve cooperation across the MOSAIC project. I hope that everyone involved will feel inspired by the way of the fungi and work together happily in our fungal network, achieving both personal and project objectives.
- Dieter Cuypers, project coordinator.