Capilano College instructors conducted this research in partnership with the WISH Drop-In Society and the Downtown Eastside Lifeskills Centre. Betsy Alkenbrack collected the data and did the literature review, then compiled the report in consultation with Diana Twiss and Sarah Evans. Between us, we have worked at WISH for a total of five years and Betsy worked at the Downtown Eastside Lifeskills Centre during the year that the research was conducted. Sarah is a manager at InSite, the Safe Injection Site. We have all worked with marginalized adult learners for many years and our department has an eleven-year history of working in partnership with Downtown Eastside organizations. We are also active Researchers-in-Practice: Diana has been a researcher and contributor to four research projects (Alderson & Twiss, 2003; Battell, 2001; Battell, Gesser, Rose, Sawyer, & Twiss, 2004; Hoddinott, 1998) and Betsy is active with RiPAL-BC^{Footnote 2}, a group that supports and promotes RiP in BC. Marina Niks and Suzanne Smythe from RIPAL-BC provided editorial and research support for this report.

Conducting this research has been very helpful to us as practitioners, and we hope other adult literacy practitioners who are curious about Harm Reduction will find it useful too. It may also be useful to other front-line workers who use a Harm Reduction approach in health, workplace or community sectors.

A Note about language

We have used “we” — representing the team as a whole –to introduce you to this research report, and will use it again at the end of the report. However, the literature review and the description of the research will be written in the first person singular (“I”) because the experiences described and the reflections on the literature and the research process are written from Betsy’s perspective. In some cases, we have added comments from Sarah, and this is noted.