My belief about community-oriented solutions is that they work best when they tap into the community’s existing resilience and resources, while serving in the role of an ally, using my education and experience to help develop these grassroots solutions. A community has the available resources including solidarity, passion for solving their challenges, knowledge from the peoples’ lived experiences, and a shared desire to improve living conditions for the world around them. These beliefs come from a concept I learned back in 2019 when I was working on a grant with a settlement agency helping Syrian refugees acculturate to life in Canada. We searched for previous models of successful cultural welcoming and came across a concept known as “intentional recognition” in the psychology literature. Intentional recognition is based on the idea that each person has something valuable to contribute to a social movement based on their individual background, knowledge, and lived experience. Remembering intentional recognition helped me realize that I could work to address this shared historical adversity by allying with communities and incorporating evidence-based knowledge into my partnerships. This motivation developed into my potential through my following years of psychology research, community intervention, dissertation mixed-methods research, and activist partnerships.