Breaking Bread, Building Hope: An Eight-Year Partnership Addressing the Toxic Drug Crisis in British Columbia

Research that purports to engage communities has become more mainstream, presenting an imperative to thoughtfully engage ethical principles that grapple with on-the-ground complexities of the work. Here we reflect on learnings from an eight-year, community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnership in British Columbia, Canada that addressed the ongoing public health emergency of toxic drug-related deaths in a semi-urban and rural setting. This challenging research context provides a methodological petri dish from which to examine common ethical challenges inherent in CBPR work. Here we discuss how praxis aligned with the concepts of relationality, embeddedness and embodiment contain both tension and promise in complex research contexts. We depict how relational authenticity was facilitated by flexibility and informal interactions and was further enhanced by deeply-engaged, physical presence that enkindled hope even when hope was hampered by limited agency. We also present commensality as a promising methodological tool.