Written in the first person and drawing from an autoethnographic methodological framework, this essay shares aspirations, experiences, and reflections on a faculty member's professional work in a large U.S. public research-oriented university, focusing specifically on her attempts to reconcile her service-oriented civic engagement work with her university's priorities and workplace conditions. The author positions her work within a larger community of practice in art education higher education, a community dedicated to embracing cultural diversity and social justice, and whose work now takes place in multiple sites, including but not limited to schools and universities. The author establishes linkages between contemporary art education values and aims, and recently popular writings about the creative class, the new creative economy, and the contributions of cultural creatives to community development. These connections help the author establish a personal philosophical foundation for her current work and to explore an entrepreneurial framework-both as a means of facilitating her own public engagement projects and for advancing public engagement as a legitimate form of university faculty work. The essay is written as a reflective narrative about lessons learned in pursuit of these aims. Through utilization of short stories (or vignettes) of some of the author's public-engagement-oriented work, she identifies entrepreneurial strategies that have facilitated this work along with problems encountered, uncertainties, and failures. The essay concludes with an optimistic but untested proposition that university faculty members may make a difference in the world not only through their service-oriented civic endeavors, but also in their ability to help shape and improve university institutional conditions that make this work possible. As the author concludes, being connected to a community of practice beyond ones current place of employment is central to these goals. (Contains 38 endnotes.)