From 2017 to 2021, the Youth Action Research Revolution (YARR) team documented the institutional histories of young people experiencing homelessness in Canada. Interviews with youth focused on educational, child welfare, health care, and criminal justice institutions. Situated at the intersections of critical adult education (CAE), participatory action research (PAR), and institutional ethnography (IE), we outline our mobilization of IE to ground learning and action in our team. We document the different phases of learning that we undertook to illustrate how CAE, PAR, and IE can be mutually supportive frameworks for praxis and activist learning. We highlight our use of IE to illuminate and resist the institutionalizing processes at work in post-secondary contexts and reflect on the importance of mutual aid as essential to realizing the social justice potential of participatory research. We suggest that co-creating IE research with young adults with lived experiences of homelessness constitutes a unique opportunity to mobilize CAE values and tangibly support community research that seeks to positively influence the lives of those implicated by the problems we study together.