April 2026

By Nivedita Ranade, ETB Associate Project Director

In 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic, everything stopped. Convenings were canceled. Conferences disappeared. The informal spaces — hallways and shared meals — where relationships were built vanished overnight. But the need for connection didn’t go away. It intensified.

At Expanding the Bench® (ETB), we saw this clearly: if the evaluation field was going to continue moving toward equity during this time, it could not do so without real connection and relationships. A catalyst was needed to bring people together. So we asked a simple question: What would it look like for ETB to spark intentional, authentic, real-time connection?

That’s how Coffee Breaks began.

By serving as a connector and catalyst, ETB created the conditions for relationships that might not have happened otherwise — and it worked. Connections formed. Conversations shifted how people saw their work and each other. It reminded us that relationship-building is not peripheral to social change; it is foundational.

Today, the field is no longer in the same moment as 2020. Coffee Breaks met a critical need in a critical moment. But as the learning and evaluation ecosystem has grown and evolved, so have expectations for what these spaces must do.

Explore Coffee Breaks in Focus: Key Takeaways and Ideas for Strengthening the Approach to see what we learned — and what it will take to carry this work forward.