In the world of higher education, community engagement projects (teaching, learning, scholarly activities) boil down to people coming together under a common goal to make change. At its best, all actors in the partnership learn and grow. But how do these partnerships start? What is their origin story? To answer this question, I’ll start with my initial community-engaged experiences and tell you about how Public Scholarship and Engagement (PSE) is working to facilitate more community engagement origin stories.