Project Horizon 2020: The Jesuit Education Foundation

Culture of Care

The context of the project Horizon 2020 is the Jesuit Education Foundation. This is an important fact that sets the culture in which the innovation was promoted because it implies a set of values and practices that existed in the Jesuit schools and the Catholic education. A distinctive spirit that results from the principles of Jesuit education lies in a Jesuit school. Jesuit education goes beyond promoting civic involvement and global perspectives to teach people to deal with challenging questions while anchored in deep values: "the project of Jesuit education is to be in tune with God's shaping of the persons committed to our care" (Grogan, 2015, p. 18). Thus, the core value of the organization is to bring people to the highest

Values and behaviors always have a gap that must be narrowed by strategies in a process of transformation. Horizon 2020 addressed this gap in two particular ways: first, promoting a corporate identity to bring individualities to a common goal and second, generating different spaces where people could find their solutions to their own particular problems.

In the first case, the future of the entire network working together as a community was a difficult horizon to envision. Eight schools working in the same area had not had the significant collaboration that they do today. Despite some skeptical voices, the Jesuit Education Foundation became one body to walk together by capitalizing the dream and showing people a possible future that was long-term resisted. This finding is also a confirmation that "revealing the future is an extremely useful way to mobilize adaptive work and yet becoming the target of resistance" (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002, p.

On its core, Jesuit education has the cura personalis or the care for the human being as a potential force that could make of every single member of the educational community an important ally for change. This corporate identity needs to be espoused with actual actions, so individuals can learn that the success of the organization relies upon the growth of the single members of the educational community. A strong corporate identity must be revealed every day in the school life, and it cannot banish the power of the informal organization, interpersonal alliances, and meaningful relationships that move changes forward. When toughness that challenges people to give the most of themselves is exercise without regulation, the abuse of power in form of autocracy takes place in the organization. Holding environments as one of the "major strategic challenges" are a key response to address both, individuals' concerns regarding the change and the necessity to create a corporate identity that is meant to be human-centered. Although Horizon 2020 could have been more intentional about it, the strategy proved to be the "power … to facilitate adaptive work" as they were the environments to "promote the problem-solving process", to "control the heat" and "to pace the work" in a journey to a successful innovation (Heifetz, 1994, p. 105; Heifetz & Linsky, 2002, p.