Building a partnership ourselves: Initiating innovative development in community

This dissertation is about the complexity and the promise involved in forming inter-sectoral partnerships aimed toward holistic community development. It is focused on an innovative partnership between an inner-city school and a major research hospital nearby.;Students, faculty, and administrators from the school and administrators and preceptors (doctors and nurses) from the hospital were interviewed about their experiences, learning and ways of making meaning from the partnering process. Observations of diverse meetings and archival documents added to the data involved in this hermeneutical inquiry.;Organizational environments have become increasingly turbulent and swampy (Schon 1987, 5). An area turned swampy evokes the image that roads are lost and directions fuzzy. New ways to frame and connect are then demanded. Chaos theory can be explored and applied as a more radical metaphor to understand this kind of situation, since it calls for a reversion of conventional knowledge and approaches to sciences, bringing new visions to life and organizing.;This study addresses the struggles lived in the grassroots, where praxis and wisdom enlighten the conventional uses of deduction and induction, so widely utilized in the definitions and practices of human relations, administration and organizing.;With few directions set, and with no compelling voice to lead the collectivity, the solution includes giving room to conversations and exchanges. Consciousness of the disparities among the partnering groups arises as stories and experiences are heard and visits shared. Reciprocity, then, is rediscovered; give-and-take, surpassing utilitarian models, becomes a complementary connection, in a relationship where experiences are imparted and received graciously, mutually fulfilling the parts through meaningful transformations.;Participants, in this experience, were able to illustrate the relevance of organizational self-renewing by inventing meanings and practices that bring dynamic and structure to the partnership. Chaos became an opportunity for semantic creations, and to treat order in the realm of social invention.;Partnerships represent innovation. Horizons become fused and expanded; growth, through exchange, is assured as participants make each other stronger; renewal affirms life, as everyone learns to frame, to apply and to change. Humans become agents as a project is developed and enjoyed.;Culmination can then materialized in the abilities of the collectivity to deal with the situation critically, with connections collaboratively and with the future creatively.