Freshwater management must adapt to uncertain water availability under climate change while balancing competing demands from different human communities. These efforts are hampered by disconnects between the actions and objectives of managers, scientists, policymakers, and community members. To better connect these parties and inform management decisions, there has been a rich history of studying the diversity and plurality of community values. However, this research has often focused on assessing value systems. Less is known about how people relate values to each other, or how those value systems connect to the explicit choices and transformations people would make in the future under resource scarcity. Working in the Goulburn-Broken Catchment, Victoria, we examined how community members group and relate values to each other. We conducted semi-structured interviews with community members from different backgrounds and industries. We also examined policy documents from state, regional, local, and indigenous sources to determine a list of values previously identified through policy processes. Using a mixture of open-ended questions and prioritization exercises, we identified patterns in how different people related values and prioritized them. We explored connections between how people organize their value systems and the changes they would accept for their river systems in a water-scarce future. We found that people had diverse preferences for how they interpreted the connections between values, and these were related to how they wanted to see those values managed. This project reveals how to better elicit information about values to inform decisions with declining water resources in the context of climate change. This information has the potential to help enhance social resilience and foster a resilient water management approach.