Budburst, a community science program hosted at the Chicago Botanic Garden, pursues two primary goals: Research and education. Budburst brings together researchers, educators, gardeners, and community scientists on a shared journey to uncover the stories of plants affected by human impacts on the environment. Budburst tells these stories through data collection, data sharing, education, and personal connections. We run three concurrent research projects broadly focused on plants and climate change and plant-animal interactions. We connect with community scientists by working with community organizations, libraries, and schools. Budburst is building partnerships with local Chicagoland high schools and colleges to work on our Pollinators and Climate project. This project is ideal for high school and college students because they can observe plants and pollinators over the course of a semester, explore their own independent research questions in the context of the broader project, and learn valuable data management and analysis skills by examining both their own data as well as the larger project database. This project has been successful at giving students hands-on research experience, teaching content focused on place-based climate science, ecology, plant life cycles, plant-animal interactions, and more. We invite educators and researchers who engage with the public to learn about this research program and bring it to schools near them. For our Milkweeds and Monarchs project, we investigate whether monarch butterflies preferentially lay eggs on flowering or non-flowering milkweed stems. We partner with local Chicago community organizations, libraries, and Forest Preserve sites to train participating community scientists, gather data, and disseminate educational information in English and Spanish. We’ve managed virtual and in-person trainings, run bilingual trainings, and found success by providing educational materials, take-home kits that included plants and magnifying glasses, and funding to both organizations and participants. Budburst would like to share successful practices, lessons learned, and ways we plan to iterate and improve. We invite community scientists and organizations to join the project; data can be collected across the entire monarch migration route. Budburst is a project that can be adapted for students ages K-12, higher education, and adults and is an easy and interactive way to engage the public in authentic scientific research. We invite educators, researchers, community scientists, and conservation organizations to join the project and see what Budburst has to offer!