ALT 1. COMMUNITY: Reducing the distance between researchers and community collaborators Our research centers lived experiences from communities which are not typically represented in AI research. We strongly believe in a bottom-up approach, supporting and prioritizing research and researchers that emerge from the communities that we center in our work and their specific needs. Our approach comprises three key aspects. First, by fostering a distributed team, we reduce the distance between researcher and community collaborators––both geographically and in terms of our researchers’ contextual knowledge of and commitment to specific community needs. Second, we refuse to treat any individual as a tokenized stand-in for any community. Instead, we understand community as a network of shared trust, accountability, similar beliefs, bounds of solidarity, and shared resources. Finally, we realize that there is a long history of researchers co-opting research and knowledge authored by specific communi