For teacher educators, one challenge is how to prepare pre-service teachers to engage more deeply with students in high-poverty communities, some of whom they will ultimately teach. Addressing community engagement requires an institutionally embedded strategy to involve Indigenous, refugee, poor, and other historically vulnerable communities in central, rather than tokenistic, ways. This paper reports on the first conceptual stages of a framework for an Australian community-engaged pathway into teaching based on research into how teachers can work for and alongside under-represented families from high-poverty communities.