We view community members as key actors in developing meaningful approaches to cope with difficulties. A community is characterized by aspects of locality and structure but also by psychosocial characteristics like identity, a feeling of belonging, care and mutuality with others. Taking a community-based perspective means to take actions depending on community voices, to implement through community structures, to focus on services on the individual, group and policy-making level while building an effective system in which all actions feed into each other.

We act alongside the people. They know the needs in their communities and have visions for future directions. They have direct insights into strengths and challenges of interventions during implementation and develop ideas for promising future actions. While information provision and consultation are on the lowest levels of participation and have to be ensured regardless of the circumstances in all our actions, we strive to reach the highest level of equal responsibilities and partnership.

We respect values, beliefs and traditions of communities which give meaning and functionality to their lives. Interventions are most effective if they are developed and adapted in consideration of community characteristics. Taking a context and culture-based perspective means to be aware of underlying socio-cultural processes, to embed actions in it and to target outcomes in suitable ways.

We strive for transformations towards social justice by addressing the root causes of discrimination and inequality. There are many people that are confronted with daily discrimination and exclusion based on gender, sexual orientation, ability and alleged origin, amongst others. Often, they are most severely affected by challenging situations. Taking a human rights-based perspective demands to protect all community members against abuse, violence or exploitation of any kind and to support them to exercise their rights and reach their full potential.

We view people as self-determined individuals that affect their surrounding while being persuaded to adapt to its conditions. Ecology includes not only human relationships and culture but also the planetary biosphere and the climate. Beyond that, situations are not only made of current interactions between people and their environment but also of the past. Taking an ecological time course perspective means to consider individuals, families, communities and nature and to keep in mind the importance of time-points on people's experiences and behaviours.

We build our actions on existing theory and research findings (i.e. from psychological, social and environmental science) and on implicit theory (i.e. stakeholder theory). During implementation, we examine what works, for whom, how and why. Apart from individual factors, we look at contextual features, variations across different sub-groups of the target population, variations in the magnitude of outcomes and effects over time. Taking an evidence and research perspective ensures the inclusion of previous findings and good practices, facilitates improvement and supports learning for future actions.