March 2025
by Nivedita Ranade, ETB Associate Project Director

Embracing Change: Lessons from Nature on Growth, Resilience, and Connection   

My name is Nivedita Ranade and I am the newest member of the Expanding the Bench® (ETB) Team! 

Growing up in India, I knew only three seasons – summer, monsoon, and winter. But living in the United States for the past 20 years, I have come to appreciate the subtle beauty and the symbolic and meaningful lessons in the changing cycles of nature in ways I hadn’t fully realized before.

The arrival of March always brings a quiet but powerful shift in the air. As winter begins to loosen its grip, the subtle signs of spring start to emerge. March is a month of transition — an in-between time where the cold fades, days get longer, and Mother Earth begins to stir, gently preparing for the vibrant and colorful renewal that comes with spring. As I see how nature takes its time to embrace this shift, I see that parallel reflected in how I navigated my own recent professional journey. While 2024 was a time to take a reprieve, restore and rejuvenate, 2025 has brought the promise of growth, fresh ideas, and new intentions. As I onboard to my role on the ETB Team, I am excited, honored, and humbled to work at the powerful and dynamic intersection of field building and evaluation at a time when our field needs it the most!

The current political climate is attacking and dismantling the very principles ETB is founded upon and ETB’s North Star is at risk. In these moments of adversity, I find myself again, turning to the powerful lessons that nature teaches us. Symbiosis and connection are deeply woven into the fabric of nature, and they provide us with rich lessons about how we can find strength (the tree against the wind), patience (a seed blossoming into a tree), resilience (a flower blooming through concrete), and perseverance (a river cutting through rock) to weather this storm by embracing cooperation (the bees and the flowers), interdependence (the nitrogen cycle), and balance (fire and forest regeneration) to emerge even stronger.

As we embark on navigating these new unchartered political waters, I invite you, individually and collectively, to draw upon our ability to connect, collaborate, and support each other in meaningful ways to protect and preserve the beauty of our equitable, diverse, and inclusive evaluation ecosystem.