Higher education-community partnerships can lead to fruitful rewards that are difficult to realize any other way. However, efforts to create, maintain, and sustain collaborative working relationships include inevitable tensions, the "politics of engagement." Lessons learned about the politics of engagement are presented in this paper. The lessons are drawn from dialogue that emerged from a series of interconnected dialogues--first among Kellogg Foundation higher education-community grantees working across the United States in local food systems development and, later, as the grantees expanded the circle of conversation to include colleagues attending a national food systems conference. Field-based experiences revealed the importance of understanding partnerships as relationships between inherently different parties. These differences can impede or destroy partnership development unless they are acknowledged and converted into sources of strength. Responding successfully to the politics of engagement requires mindful choice-making by creating context-sensitive and responsive strategies to highly charged community and academic realities.