Shared values, capacity building and a powerful focus upon learning and leadership (at all levels) would be inter-related elements of many consultants' recipe for school and community regeneration. Add to that collective alignment around core purposes, enquiry processes and collaborative working norms, and you have a powerful combination of improvement forces. The problem with good theory, though, is that it has to be interpreted and enacted within the dynamically complex real world of schools. Operationalising theory--in particular in environments of unusual challenge--is often insurmountably difficult. One of the ways in which coherence and meaning can resolve this tension is to draw the shared values set from the synergies between school aspirations and community purposes--to house school transformation within community regeneration. In this paper, the author, who has been involved in school networks in South African communities, presents a case study from one of the schools in this project--a school which sought to integrate community and educational purposes in a mutually regenerative process.