Classically educated ecologists often have little to no training on approaches or techniques to engage with the human dimensions of complex environmental problems. This session will present such methods and discuss the unjust distribution of most environmental burdens, as well as pragmatic approaches to help communities meet environmental challenges. The recognized imperative to embrace inclusion and diversity extends not only to including professional ecologists from different backgrounds, but also to building bridges between ecologists and the diversity of communities with whom they must partner to develop relevant solutions. The session’s six speakers build an argument that to collaborate with, and contribute to, diverse communities of practice, ecologists must develop new approaches for inquiry to gain insights that inform mutual benefits and solutions. The first presenter will outline general principles and frameworks for enabling collaborative coaction, in part derived from an ESA workshop held in Louisville 2019. The second speaker will describe teaching and training approaches that embed these principles into curricula that are designed to foster future ecologists as ethical change agents. An early career academic will reflect on their experience of becoming a practitioner of diverse community engagement, and employer expectations for skill sets that ecologists possess and can apply in varied organizational contexts. The fourth speaker will present on the challenge of influencing both formal and informal policy-makers to effect positive collective action at a range of scales, including negotiating issues of social power and community pragmatics. A student perspective will then weave these concepts and approaches into a case study drawn from transdisciplinary research into food and nutritional security. The final speaker will reflect on the pragmatics of a commitment from ESA to extend its tent to include communities in the location of its annual conference in ways that will synergistically acquaint local groups with ecologists and provide inspiration for ecologists to engage such communities in their own home communities. The concepts and ideas generated in this session could ground a proposition that ESA builds a commitment to interact with local communities and leave a legacy of improved engagement into its annual conference program.