The Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration on Earth System Modeling Tools is a small community comprising members with diverse backgrounds, skills, and interests. Largely dependent on temporary staff to develop, operate, and maintain large scientific codes, this community devised strategies to enhance software reusability and sustainability. These strategies include collaborating with other communities for support, adopting Open Science as well as findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable principles to optimize resource usage, growing essential knowledge within the community, and setting up a community of practice to facilitate onboarding and offboarding. The strategies also promote inclusiveness, foster external collaboration, and recognize technical contributions.