The catalyst was a memorandum from The Prince of Wales to Julia Cleverdon, who was the chief executive officer of BITC, and John O'Brien MBE, who was the director of personal programmes.
The name Mosaic was settled upon between Cleverdon and O'Brien in a meeting at BITC, where, after approval via Clarence House from The Prince of Wales, this was presented to initial supporters.
The Original Funders of the initiative were identified by O'Brien through his personal networks and invited to meet with the Prince of Wales at Clarence House in 2007.
At this time Jonathan Freeman who was later to be seconded into Mosaic, was a senior civil servant in charge of such grant assessments and Muslim community engagement.
O'Brien is universally credited as being the creative and entrepreneurial force behind the early years of Mosaic with him personally creating the Enterprise Challenge, The Media network, the speakers bureau and then the Mosaic International Leadership School, which he presented to the Prince of Wales as a 60th Birthday present in 2008 at a major gala dinner held at London's Natural History Museum.
[9] On O'Brien's departure, the BITC Prince's Programmes were broken up as a group and the Mosaic was led by the National Director, Jonathan Freeman, formerly a senior UK civil servant.
Some initial funders and supporters moved away at this time and the number of component parts of Mosaic were reduced, but the over-arching effect was that the school programme gained increased recognition and achieved many awards.
[21][22][23] The Apax-Mosaic Enterprise challenge was an innovative computer based game originally developed by O'Brien with subsequent co-chair (post Princess Badiya) Khawar Mann OBE, whose co-chair was Yasmin Waljee OBE, who hosted the challenge finals at law firm Hogan Lovells which she was head of Pro-bono support.