Drawing upon a long-term partnership between a university and a Title I middle school, we outline relational principles that guided our justiceoriented approach to collaborative research. We conceptualize relational principles as intentional strategies for equitable relationship cultivation and infrastructure development, grounded in the values and sociocultural backgrounds that each stakeholder brings to the partnership. Five principles emerged from our reflections, represented by the following adages: "don't assume neutrality," "recognize the means create the ends," "move at the speed of trust," "broaden ideas of benefit," and "strive for responsiveness, not perfection." Each principle is presented and described using examples that illustrate how these principles can be enacted within educational research partnerships. We conclude with a discussion of potential implications for fostering coherency among community-engaged research perspectives, with relational principles acting as a potential bridge between value-driven community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches and practice-oriented tools from the research-practice partnership (RPP) field.