Achieving the objectives of the Reef 2050 Long-Term Sustainability Plan requires widespread community engagement, support, participation, and practice change. However, without an adequate understanding of community values, perceptions, institutional trust, and support for management initiatives, there is an increased risk that the Reef 2050 objectives will not be met. The Social and Economic Long-Term Monitoring Program (SELTMP) for the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) provides critical information on the status and trend of societal values, uses, perceptions, stewardship, and attitudes towards management of the Reef. In this presentation, we describe outcomes of the recent co-design process to develop indicators, a new monitoring instrument, and establish a baseline dataset for human dimension monitoring by the Regional Report Card partnerships in the GBR catchment. These partnerships play an integral role in the management of waterways, engaging a wide cross-section of stakeholders and their community through annual report cards. We include a showcase of some of their new baseline results, describing community values, perceptions of management issues, and governance of waterways in the GBR catchment, and we outline how these data will influence GBR waterway management into the future and inform ways to promote stewardship and management action at the regional scale.