This article explores how knowledge of institutional ecologies can help build connections across departments of large universities without direct communication. The authors, an instructor and a writing center tutor, consider "inventive collaboration"--impromptu work mediated by student writing--as a way to improve a multilingual student's writing. This experience serves as a test case to highlight how the rhetorical strategies of inventive collaboration can improve students' rhetorical attunement, awareness of audience, and agency over their writing. While the authors recognize the uniqueness of their indirect collaboration, they also offer an assessment of the institutional and individual components that allowed for this collaboration to take place.