This article describes how Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (SIUC) partnered with twelve rural schools with high percentages of students in poverty. SIUC provided faculty development activities featuring the adoption of Cognitively Guided Instruction, combined with activities to increase math content and to reduce math anxiety for groups of instructors lacking specific training in mathematics. The partnership is a positive example of a complex-brokered partnership, with instructional experts who were not members of the SIUC faculty. The success and sustainability of this partnership are analyzed to discover the factors that contributed to the durability of what may have been, in other circumstances, a fragile and weak partnership. (Contains 4 tables.)