Sustainable development initiatives are proliferating in the US and Europe as engineering educators seek to provide students with knowledge and skills to design technologies that are environmentally sustainable. Many such initiatives involve students from the ‘North,’ or ‘developed’ world building projects for villages or communities in the ‘South.’ Sustainable development projects in engineering education are being lauded for meeting multiple educational outcomes and providing students with important international training. This paper argues that such programmes need to educate students to think critically about their role as development professionals, to understand and value the role of community in development projects, and to develop long-term assessment criteria for such projects. It argues that engineering educators need to meaningfully engage the ‘community’ in sustainable community development.