Recent initial teacher education policy and regulatory frameworks privilege "classroom ready" discourses. Taking up "readiness" as technical skill requiring more "practice" leads to narrowing of teachers' roles and efficacy with increasing pressure and regulation that marginalises ideals to equip pre-service teachers to be "community ready". We argue that enabling preservice teacher agency to engage with community beyond notions of mastering bounded classroom practice is critical to teachers' roles. Supporting teachers to teach in context as engaged global citizens requires a readiness of relational understanding and skills about the lived experiences of learners, and their wider community contexts. Data from a critical service learning case study highlight how preservice teacher agency to engage with community is conceptualised and experienced in simultaneously beneficial and challenging ways. These findings indicate the complex, yet necessarily significant contributions of service learning experiences to the development of preservice teacher "readiness".