At a time when the vulnerabilities and challenges faced by service users become increasingly complex, social work education is challenged to equip students with the necessary practical skills and knowledge to engage with service users across many levels. Yet in working with marginalized populations, social work education needs to support emerging professionals to develop the courage and capacity to find creative ways outside of neoliberal social work practice, to challenge systems of oppression on an everyday level. This chapter asserts that enhancing the teaching of social work history offers students opportunities to explore how professionals have responded to challenges in positive and negative ways. The example covered in this chapter focuses on how social workers—in partnership with other care providers—served as co-conspirators in providing care to people living with HIV/AIDS in an underserved community in California in the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s–1990s. Social workers created networks to share information at a time when information was scarce; overcame the stigma around their own provision of care work to advocate not just for but with persons living with HIV/AIDS; and created alternative systems of providing services outside of traditional social work institutions. The experiences of social workers as co-conspirators during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in Fresno, California, highlights how learning local social work history can support students in developing knowledge about social structures, institutional histories, and the ways people have resisted oppression.