Background: This paper presents a review of the literature and trends related to social values and sustainabledevelopment and describes a set of case studies from a variety of community‑based projects which illustrate theadvantages that social values bring about as part of efforts to promote sustainability. Three approaches were used todevelop this study: a bibliometric analysis of the topic “social values and sustainable development”, an analysis of casestudies that concretely present community projects addressing social values and sustainability, and the developmentof a framework linking up bibliometric clusters and the cases studies. Results: While the bibliometric analysis revealed clusters where social values are strongly connected with sustain‑able development, the case studies indicated the lack of a common terminology and understanding of the relationbetween social values, sustainable development, and community‑based projects. Conclusions: The study concludes by suggesting a set of measures that could be deployed to better take socialvalues into account when planning policies or making decisions related to community projects.