In recent years, calls to decolonize the production of knowledge and an increased recognition of the ethical obligations researchers owe to the communities they work in have dramatically increased interest among anthropologists in conducting community-based and community-engaged research. However, a somewhat bewildering collection of definitions for what constitutes ‘community-based’ - paired with few good models for what ‘community-based’ research actually looks like on the ground - threatens to turn the idea into yet another set of buzzwords. Moreover, desires to conduct authentic community-based work often run up against institutional, structural, and logistical factors that further act to limit researchers’ abilities to operationalize ethical best practices. In this workshop, we hear from speakers from across the anthropological subdisciplines on how they navigate ethical and structural difficulties to enact meaningful community-based research. In doing so, our goal is to chart out sets of actionable strategies and best practices that can be applied to on-going and future work at the graduate and post-graduate level.