This paper aims to present action research experiences in Romanian context and reflection on possible contributions from architectural education to helping neighborhood communities. For the Bucharest team of ATU- Association for Urban Transition, the project entitled Urban Education Live - Innovative Urban Education in Live Settings (2018–2020) was about applying social mapping tools for helping a civic initiative group to define a common agenda that was presented to the local authorities as the first neighborhood development plan in Romania. A new project entitled CoNECT - Collective Networks for Everyday Community Resilience and Ecological Transition was initiated in 2022 and it is aiming to identify collaboration mechanisms among various stakeholders for helping grass-roots initiatives addressing transition challenges to have more visibility and impact. Both projects are implemented in the framework of the Urban Europe Joint Partnership Initiative as a research program demonstrating a solid concern for the social impact of research on communities. Research on connections between space and communities means testing ideas and tools coming from the training of built environment professionals and helping neighborhood communities and master students to work together on concrete objectives and formats. By doing so, architects and other professionals learn how to offer their support in building bridges between grass roots initiatives and decision-making processes since these formats are the ones used to plan and design interventions for transforming spaces.