Chapter 7: Addressing Rural, Wicked Problems Through Collaboration: A Critical Reflection on a School–Community–University Design Process

The well-being of rural youth in the context of the many challenges faced by rural communities in the 21st century can be a wicked problem, or a problem so complex that it requires coordinated efforts from multiple sectors and stakeholders to even begin to address it. In this chapter, we describe our design process as a university–school–community partnership dedicated to leveraging schools and multi-sector collaboration to address the effects of toxic stress on rural youth. Using critical sense-making as a framework for our reflections, we describe our decision-making process as we evaluated a federal grant opportunity, while simultaneously analyzing interview and focus group data collected from rural youth and educators. We describe the insights that emerged from engaging in these parallel inquiry processes into the needs of rural partnerships and the poor fit between the federal conceptualization of rural innovation and the needs of our community. We conclude that rural communities and schools need relational approaches to innovation and design that foreground community and youth wisdom, while acknowledging the messy, wicked nature of the university–school–community partnership itself.