Applied to environments of real world learning, the notion of “community” holds one potential key to reshaping and enhancing higher education experiences for participants, including learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL). This paper uses the concept of “community” to contextualise the experiences of learners in a project where advanced EAL learners undertook volunteer work as part of a cultural learning curriculum. This project gave learners access to “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger 1992; Wenger 1998), providing contexts where instructors can reshape learners’ higher education experiences by identifying cultural learning opportunities within the volunteer sector of the community. In educational research, the properties of  “community” include insider support, common goals, shared discourse and membership (Rovai 2002). The occurrence of such features in a student’s volunteering placement depends on the degree of “investment” (Bourdieu 1977, 1991; Norton 2000, 2006, 2010; Pittaway 2004) participants have in individual and community goals. In the project, the journalised reflections of migrants and international students participating in a degree in EAL in New Zealand reveal the cultural and ontological value of community work. This paper uses the concepts of real and imagined communities to theorise the participants’ investments in their learning, presents qualitative findings from the project, and describes a range of benefits for EAL learners’ learning in community. The paper concludes that investing in community can prepare learners for their future and imagined communities while reshaping significant aspects of cultural learning.