Community stewardship is vital for restoring the Great Barrier Reef. Understanding and enabling stewardship efforts can help to maximize impact – delivering benefits for both Reef and people. The University of Queensland and Great Barrier Reef Foundation worked with a range of community partners to develop and pilot a Community Stewardship Monitoring Toolkit. The toolkit included templates, guides, and resources to support monitoring and evaluation using practical approaches. Tailored one-on-one support to implement the toolkit resources was available to community and Traditional Owner groups to strengthen their project outcomes and MEL. The resources and tailored support were designed to respond to community feedback and make behavioural and social psychological principles accessible for groups to inform stewardship initiatives, as well as measure impact, adaptively manage projects and capture learnings. This presentation will demonstrate how integrating social science and robust monitoring and evaluation can enable community-driven reef stewardship. Key learnings from the pilot process will be highlighted, and case studies from community-led Reef protection projects will provide tangible examples of benefits and barriers to practice that can inform broader strategies and discussions on how to further support community stewardship initiatives to contribute towards the goals and objectives of Reef 2050.