Community engagement was a relatively unknown concept in South African higher education until the late 1990s. In response to the call of the White Paper on the Transformation of Higher Education (1997) for `feasibility studies and pilot programmes which explore the potential of community service in higher education' the Joint Education Trust launched the Community — Higher Education — Service Partnerships (CHESP) initiative in 1999. The purpose of this initiative was to assist South African Higher Education Institutions to conceptualization and implementation community engagement as a core function of the academy. This article tracks the development of community engagement in South African higher education through the CHESP initiative and identifies some of the processes and outcomes at a programmatic, institutional and national level. The article includes four South African universities as case studies to illustrate the processes and outcomes of embedding community engagement in South African higher education.