The Community-Led Unconference

In Rhode Island, years of individual and institutional work was carried out to encourage equitable and ethical collaboration between researchers, community organizations, and people with lived experience of addiction and/or substance use. This collective work revealed that other than successful individual projects, there is the need to address the lack of institutional progress, and systemic issues within and between these stakeholders. Lack of trust, inequitable value distribution between researchers and community members, imbalance of power dynamics, inefficient or biased resource distribution, tokenism, and stigma were some of the issues brought to light that are still prevalent today.

All this led to a need to build accountability in research practice and remedy harms committed by researchers against people with substance use disorder and/ or those with lived experience. Held at the Providence Public Library on March 7, 2024 and facilitated by CfC, the “Community-Led Conversation about Substance Use, Harm Reduction, and Recovery Research in Rhode Island” used an ‘unconference’ format. It was designed for flexibility, where community members held agency to set the agenda and topics of discussion through open proposal submissions and voting. It centered voices with lived and living experience in order to created a safe and open space to build stronger relationships between people with substance use disorders, their allies, and researchers. Attendees were committed to tackling problems together; set an agenda for institutional change; and worked towards concrete results.

The top three demands that came out of the Unconference:

1. Clear mechanisms of accountability of both individual researchers and research organizations to the organizations and communities that make their research possible.
2. Active involvement of community partners in choosing research study topics and determining future directions of research.
3. Involve community members and organizations in training substance use researchers how not to be jerks.

In the months that followed the Unconference, researchers and community participants who volunteered to join subcommittees met to organize ways to meet these three demands while preparing to run the next Unconference. The design of multi-stakeholder relationships resilient enough to flourish outside the boundaries of curated engagements is a fundamental challenge in systems work. With this in mind, CfC assumed a semi-active role facilitating these meetings through 2024 and 2025, helping researchers hold themselves accountable to work with the community to create pathways towards institutional change and justice in research practice.

Learn more about the project at community-led.us