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While equity in climate adaptation is increasingly recognized, university-based research can inadvertently reinforce inequities. This paper examines a partnership between Homies Helping Homies, a South Philadelphia mutual aid organization, and university researchers to document climate impacts on low-income and marginalized communities. Inequities often arise when research fails to engage communities, overlooks relevant concerns, lacks trust, or misinterprets responses due to insufficient cultural understanding. Mutual aid organizations, inherently community-based, foster resilience and solidarity, addressing unmet needs while building collective trust. Anchored in Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), we adopt a reflexive, co-produced approach that foregrounds positionality, reciprocity, and shared decision-making. This approach transformed the researcher-community relationships, leveled hierarchies, and addressed the gaps in familiarity among researchers and other actors. By centering everyday experiences of heat, flooding, and resource scarcity, the collaboration revealed how local knowledge and trust networks shape risk perception and adaptive behavior. The case demonstrates how mutual aid organizations can serve as both community resilience infrastructure and methodological partners in producing usable, justice-oriented climate knowledge. We argue that embedding research within reciprocal, care-centered relationships enhances the legitimacy, ethics, and transformative potential of climate risk management, particularly in urban contexts marked by systemic inequity.