Community science starts with listening to communities and understanding and centering their priorities. Communities should be centrally involved in shaping research goals and questions from the outset to ensure the rest of the project builds on this crucially important foundation.

Community science is driven by deep, meaningful, and respectful inclusion of community insights. Centering and honoring this knowledge helps ensure that all aspects of the community science project meet community goals and create sustainable, positive impacts.

Driven by community priorities and co-created with partners, community science activities benefit from sharing leadership with communities throughout the project and co-owning the process and results. Shared leadership is shared decision-making power. Co-ownership involves physical ownership of products such as data collections, analyses, results, and communications of results.

Successful community science work focuses on building equitable relationships and advancing equitable outcomes. This requires a focus on inclusion throughout the research project, such as co-creation, co-leadership and co-ownership, capacity-building, and creating respectful spaces, processes, and relationships to center community priorities.

Community science is about working with communities to engage science and technology in locally relevant and topical problem solving to address community priorities, values, and aspirations. In almost all cases, community science will involve creating and enacting innovative solutions to scientific and societal questions and problems.