The purpose of the current article was to compare the retrospective experiences of community partners with higher education (HE) qualifications, in community engagement (CE) in order to inform global citizenship as a HE agenda. Qualitative methodology was appropriate in this study as we were interested in gaining in-depth insight into the understanding of partners of HE-rural school CE-partnership. We conveniently selected an existing Flourishing Learning Youth intervention for the purpose of secondary data analysis of the retrospective experiences of several participant-groups. Researchers confirm that HE should promote social justice in development interventions. Insight generated by this study is the fact that community challenges are not confined to a lack of assets, but also include ignorance about the invaluable local resources.