Community–university partnerships are a critical vehicle for promoting sustainability, and the partnerships themselves can be sustained by ensuring that participants achieve mutual benefits in terms of their respective goals and missions. Although the literature emphasizes mutuality and reciprocity, fewer studies investigate community partners’ motivations for participating in community–university partnerships in their own terms. Drawing on semistructured interviews and Q methodology, we identify four distinct perspectives among our community partners, each prioritizing a different set of goals and working from different interpretations of community–university partnerships. One perspective stresses solving practical problems, another focuses on building organizational capacity, a third advocates for recognition of their community’s lived experience, and a fourth aims to articulate visions of a sustainable future. These four perspectives suggest a spectrum where some partners prefer a more transactional partnership whereas others work toward a fundamental transformation of how society conceptualizes knowledge and expertise.