Community-based educational initiatives (CBEI) serves as an umbrella term to encompass all types of complementary and/or supplementary education, organised by and for various ethnic-cultural minoritized groups. These initiatives are bottom-up learning environments offering not only support for minoritized youth in their mainstream academic studies, but also providing (positive) recognition of their ethno-cultural identity and familial and community heritage (Baldridge et al., 2017; Steenwegen et al., 2022). Existing ethnographic studies have documented the classes organised in these initiatives, which range from homework support (Hall, 2002) and mathematics instruction, to language classes. These last type of classes, mother tongue or heritage language learning (under which we can document Arabic supplementary schooling), serve as an important example of minoritized communities organising their own (supplementary) education specifically to fill in gaps they experience in their children’s education; This is particularly important in contexts where mainstream education often caters to the cultural (religious and linguistic) needs of dominant ethnic majority groups but fail to be as sensitive to similar needs among minoritized communities (Clycq, 2017; Van Praag et al., 2016; Yosso 2005). Some research has been conducted to document both the organisational nature of these CBEI and the motivations of minoritized communities to organise these schools (Steenwegen et al., 2022). Yet, the processes within these initiatives, the resources they provide, and the potential impact on the educational trajectories of minoritized youth, all remain largely unknown. The paper(s) presented as part of this symposium on Arabic schooling offer new insight into the bottom-up, grassroot, educational organising various (Arabic) communities are involved in. The research took place in Flanders, a particularly interesting context to study educational initiatives as this Flemish speaking region of Belgium is notably marked by one of the largest, and quite tenacious, ethnic achievement gaps in education in Europe. Through extensive qualitative observations and interviews conducted with students, teachers, and organisers, across various CBEI, we offer new insight into how these initiatives serve as important networks of support for minoritized youth. We present these CBEI through the lens of the community-cultural wealth framework (Yosso, 2005) and offer an expansion of this framework with resources that contain the transnational nature of many of the CBEI included in this research. We also attempt to showcase the importance and impact of these (third) spaces through centring the words and experiences of minoritized young people attending these Arabic schools.

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