Student insight and community partner feedback can contribute to understanding and thus improve community-engaged learning practices. Student and community partner voices, however, are not often heard during community-engaged learning development. To ascertain student and community partner expectations for community-engaged learning, thematic analysis was performed on data from two sources: a workshop where five student panelists involved in community-engaged learning discussed their expectations of community-engaged learning, and a survey of community partners (n = 45) to examine perspectives on working with students and university partners during community-engaged learning placements. From their community placements, students expected opportunities to acquire management skills, to exercise leadership skills, and to be given responsibility. They further expected to be exposed to a variety of perspectives on how others view their expertise, and to have an involved community supervisor who would give an orientation of the organization, provide ongoing supervision, and highlight the significance of the work students would perform in their community-engaged learning placement. Community partners appreciated having flexible timeframes and being able to negotiate length of community-engaged learning placements with university partners based on their organization's needs. Traits that they attributed to effective community-engaged learning placements and partnerships were grouped into three areas: placement characteristics, student characteristics, and university partner characteristics.