The aim of this article is twofold. It describes a long-term relationship with a not-for-profit organisation in the UK, focusing on a particular project that used drama as a tool for building self-confidence and employability. At the same time it reviews autoethnography as a research method, describing its distinctive features and questioning the relationship between empathy and exploitation, informed consent and coercive participant-manipulation. This aspect will be couched, at least in part, in terms of its own autoethnographical journey, one that interrogates the insider/outsider status of researchers whose work does not always sit comfortably within a context of identity, identification and the increasing pressure to develop work that takes place behind closed doors into public-facing outputs.