The article discusses a university supported community development initiative in a small rural town in the United States. The principle activity of the partnership being a school-university partnership to support a local resource centre. The author argues that the literature on community-university partnerships depicts each partner uniform and homogenous entities, thereby obscuring the multiple, divergent roles that different actors may play in a partnership. Attention to individuals’ roles in partnerships is important because personal interactions contribute to structuring possibilities for future action. The author agues that in her case study, “lack of ongoing university funding and turnover among community and university personnel deterred institutionalization of the partnership” (p. 5) and as a result the individual styles of various partners became increasingly important to the partnership.The article also discusses the role of ‘power’ in community-university partnerships, noting that at their best partnerships exemplify the concept of ‘power with’ (p. 2) but that disparities of power (and often rooted in class, race, gender, status, and institutional power) mean that community partners may find the experience closer to one of ‘power over’. Also draws on Stoecker (1999) to note that often the project initiator will retain more power in the relationship regardless of their position as a university or community member, suggesting the importance of policy initiatives that encourage jointly initiated research projects.