Community engaged scholars agree that service learning is the cornerstone of community engagement in higher education. Engagement is fundamental to advancing social responsibility amongst psychology students, as it allows them to learn within community spaces, become more aware of social injustices and serve disadvantaged communities in a way that social impact can be created. This paper will examine how students' substantive engagement with communities can be nurtured through both formal pedagogical practices such as service learning, community-based teaching and research and through informal strategies such as community outreach and volunteerism. To enable engagement to be strengthened within the psychology curriculum, this paper focuses on how these pedagogical practices can become entrenched within the psychology curriculum. It introduces a process which aims to empower students as socially responsive graduates through community-engaged learning. It does this by shedding light on a collaboration between a university lecturer, a Science Shop which was a university center for community engagement and a disadvantaged community in South Africa. Drawing on the experiences of post-graduate students, undergraduate students and community partners, this paper will focus on how engagement created a shift amongst students towards societal issues, how engagement became embedded in teaching, learning and the curriculum and how students partnered with a community to address social ills and other mental health problems within the community. The study found that students and community members benefitted reciprocally from this partnership, as students became more aware of the social problems within disadvantaged communities, whilst society benefited from their interventions.