The Engagement Scholarship Consortium (ESC), a 501 (c) (3) non-profit educational organization, is composed of higher education member institutions, a mix of state-public and private institutions. Our goal is to work collaboratively to build strong university-community partnerships anchored in the rigor of scholarship, and designed to help build community capacity. The ESC traces its origins back a decade when Pennsylvania State University, Ohio State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Extension initiated an annual meeting to share knowledge about their community-based programs (the National Outreach Scholarship Conference). Since then, recognizing that multi-institutional efforts could help catalyze some of the changes they wanted for their own institutions, the three began formalizing their relationship and then began inviting other institutions to join them.