As with many NSF-funded projects, our award brought together a variety of scholars from more than 10 disciplines to engage with climate-impacted communities to co-create science that would enable them to plan and implement resiliency strategies. In bringing this team together, some were able to draw on lengthy relationships with established ways of working together, while others met for the first time over Zoom. Each state also included some members with long-term connections as well as newcomers, and some strong connections crossed state teams. Our first in-person meeting a year into the project focused on identifying models that might aid us in integrating our approaches more effectively to address three community-identified issues affecting three very different types of communities: drought in a rural Oklahoma county, erosion in a Louisianna parish, and riverbank fluctuations in a Nebraska community. Models that reflect very different and often discipline-specific ways of understanding the world don’t merge well, and the concept of models itself as a way to understand and predict climate challenges reflects a specific epistemological approach not shared by all scholars. In lieu of searching for the perfect model, we drew on a different tradition and worked on creating a system-level theory of change, which allowed us to integrate some of the modeling approaches. As a result of that process, we struggled with many unresolved issues. As a result, a team member worked with the evaluation team for the project to incorporate some data collection on team members’ understanding of how scientists can work in tandem with community leaders and how we might seek solutions to these challenges through co-creating new approaches and understanding of the dynamics impacting the situations. Developing this baseline led us to search for next steps, resulting in the emergence of a voluntary self-managing reading group. In this presentation, we describe our process and present the results of the reading group intervention on the ability of our team to take the work to a higher level with a new understanding of what co-creating science means and what our team needs to know and do to successfully engage with communities to co-create science that leads to positive change in the face of climate change challenges.