Is assessment a top-down bureaucratic mandate, an undertaking that seems to have little to do with improving practice, an inauthentic activity that frustrates and disempowers, an afterthought? Or is it a process embraced and enacted together by all stakeholders as a means to learn and grow and enact change in the world? The authors of the "Democratically Engaged Assessment White Paper" (Bandy et al. 2018) believe that although the former is all too common, the latter is both possible and increasingly experienced. According to those authors, assessment--especially but not exclusively in the context of community-campus engagement--can and should be "a transformative process that involves all stakeholders in values-engaged exploration of the processes, relationships, and results of their collaborative work to reshape and renew public life" (p. 5). The members of the Assessment Team in the University of Richmond's Bonner Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) agree, and in seeking to respond to the white paper's call, have spent the past two years immersed in an exploration of assessment understood in these terms. The following sections summarize the context for undertaking DEA, share the first year of experience with it, and offer key take-aways that the authors hope will be helpful for others seeking to undertake a similar approach to assessment.