San José State Partners with Mosaic America to Expand Mosaic Atlas, a Platform for Building Communities

There are 1.9 million residents living in Santa Clara County, according to the 2025 U.S. Census Bureau. But the demographic data collected by the government does not and cannot paint a full picture of the communities who inhabit a place. Are communities defined by the language(s) they speak, their countries of origin, their income bracket or their race? What about the sports they play, the sectors they work in, the religions they practice?

"The way the census data survey a place is through demographic data," says Usha Srinivasan, co-founder and president of the nonprofit Mosaic America. "But people do not live their lives in those demographic data sets. They live their lives in places where they gather, in the traditions and customs they express."

Mosaic America, founded in 2013 by Srinivasan and Priya Das, has dedicated years to cultivating and supporting cultural communities across the region. In 2021, they received a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to create the Mosaic Atlas, an integrated digital platform designed to connect and highlight the Bay Area's cultural richness. Two years later, Mosaic America teamed up with researchers from San José State on a $500,000 grant from the Wallace Foundation to study BIPOC cultural artists across three Bay Area communities and examine how artists and advocates create, mobilize and sustain belonging and community cohesion.

The findings and community knowledge generated through the project expanded Mosaic Atlas and informed a new collection of publicly available resources. Earlier this spring, SJSU and Mosaic America made those resources available to the public:

• A comprehensive database of people, places, organizations and events rooted in culturally distinct communities
• A digital explorer map that allows users to visualize and explore artistic communities
• A series of Story Maps , narratives that combine text, interactive maps and multimedia to deepen the understanding of neighborhoods and cultural communities

A platform for community understanding

The project, which was led by Srinivasan and Das, in partnership with SJSU Professor Emerita of Anthropology Jan English-Lueck, involved dozens of SJSU undergraduates and graduate students, as well as Mosaic America employees and volunteers, with contributions from a variety of Bay Area arts groups. Cultural geographer Kerry Rohrmeir, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at SJSU until 2023, played a critical role in creating the Geographic Information System (GIS) maps.

"Usha contacted me during COVID to say that [Mosaic America] though they work with so many different cultural artists, [the artists] don't know each other," says English-Lueck. "They don't necessarily know about groups that are outside of their own immediate network. She said, 'Wouldn't it be great to have a resource that allowed artists to find venues, find each other, find collaborators and nonprofits and funders across the Bay?' They had this incredible vision, but they didn't know how to make it happen."

Rohrmeir and English-Lueck recruited a bevy of graduate students from various departments, including the master's in library and information science program, urban planning, geography, computer science and applied anthropology. Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts Sukanya Chakrabarti was an important partner as well, given her expertise and connections in the performing arts.

"Dr. Jan English-Lueck has been an extraordinary partner in bringing the vision of the Mosaic Atlas to life," says Srinivasan. "Her intellectual rigor, deep curiosity and unwavering respect for the communities we serve have strengthened every aspect of the research project. Her mentorship and guidance created meaningful opportunities for students to become researchers whose work made a tangible contribution to the Atlas and to our understanding of the Bay Area's cultural landscape. This research project is a testament to what is possible when a public university and a community organization come together to create knowledge that is both academically rigorous and deeply rooted in community."

The Atlas serves multiple purposes: Users can search by venue, artistic medium, culture or country of origin, festival or event type, and even fundraising opportunities. Artists can use it to find potential collaborators, performance spaces, cultural hubs and more. Academics, students and researchers can access the research archive, peruse transcripts from more than 100 oral storytelling recordings and explore ways to replicate the atlas' efforts in their own communities.

The resource is valuable for social services organizations and government agencies who provide resources for cultural groups that may be hard to pinpoint. Srinivasan says that the Mosaic Atlas has helped connect service providers to communities who otherwise may not know about access to healthcare, voter registration drives and other important civic opportunities. In this way, the platform becomes more than a connector of people or culture; it offers thoughtful ways of pairing service providers with people who can truly benefit from their support.

"Building trust is paramount to making visible the true nature of a place-based community; it's a unique skill," adds Srinivasan. "For over 13 years, we've been engendering trust from zero by being honest and authentic and developing relationships [with cultural organizations] without an agenda. Where populations have suffered harm and there is low trust, it becomes very important that you identify people within cultural communities who have social capital and trust."

Hands-on research experience

Among their greatest research findings, English-Lueck says, is the discovery that art is community.

"Our research question had to do with the impact of cultural arts on community cohesion," she says. "That's a very social sciencey way of saying, 'How does art build community?' And I learned that the question makes no sense, because [we were assuming that] art and community are different things. Art is what people do when they're in community."

English-Lueck explains that many artists are often forced to categorize or separate their identities from their work for the purpose of pursuing grants. To justify an organization or foundation funding their work, artists must show how their work benefits a greater community.

"When you think about what community people do to maintain or play with their own heritage, their own identities, you can't separate that [from the art they create]," she says. "I was perfectly happy to rethink my research question because it was making me question my own assumptions in ways that were really rich. And to me, that's the gold standard."

During his last semester at SJSU, Aaron Sanders, '22 Geography, created his own cultural atlas under Rohrmeir's tutelage inspired by Mosaic's project. When he finished his degree, Mosaic hired him as a data analyst, and later project manager. As the resident geographer, he collects data, gathers information, puts it in their database and uploads it to ArcGIS, a geographic information system that creates maps, analyzes spatial data and shares location-based insights.

"Originally we didn't have a GIS mapping infrastructure set up," says Sanders. "A few years ago, we had all this data but no way to visualize it. That's what I went to SJSU to study, so it was very fulfilling to take all of our data and put it on the map to get a visual of it."

San José State has its own Story Map available on the Mosaic Atlas platform, where users can explore university landmarks and resources.

Mosaic Atlas is more than a treasure trove; it's a wealth of resources that invites artists and community members to share their skills and cultural heritage, in their own words. The project is a living, breathing platform, with additional research, story maps and partners in the works.

San José State has its own Story Map on Mosaic Atlas that includes an interactive map of campus that identifies landmarks, services and events, as well as audio recordings of multiple SJSU community members - faculty, students, alumni, staff. The site is not static; it is, as the rest of the project demonstrates, a community collaboration in progress.

Explore the Mosaic Atlas.