Community-based educational initiatives [CBEI] are grassroot initiatives organized by (often minoritized) ethnic-cultural communities to provide parttime schooling for the youth from that particular community (Steenwegen et al., 2022a). CBEI offer classes that are complimentary to mainstream education as well as classes that are supplementary. Complimentary classes build on the content of the curriculum that pupils are instructed in their formal, fulltime schooling. Examples of complimentary education are homework support, and mathematics instruction (Arthur, 2003; Ganassin & Holmes, 2019). Supplementary topics are classes with content directly connected to the ethno-cultural tradition of the organizing community. Language classes in the heritage language are a good example (Ganassin, 2019). One of the reasons why many ethno-cultural communities organize parttime education emerges from this distinction; Often the cultures, languages, traditions, knowledges and ways of being of these minoritized communities are not recognized by mainstream education, let alone celebrated, as the curriculum of most mainstream education systems favours the culture and language(s) of the majority ethno-cultural group (Clycq, 2017; Van Praag et al., 2016). Ethno-cultural minoritized groups thus take it upon themselves to ensure their languages, knowledges and traditions are passed on to the next generation(s) while simultaneously honouring the schooling of their children within the mainstream education system (David & Kirsty, 2015; Steenwegen et al., 2022b; Tereshchenko, 2015). This drive to honour mainstream education and use CBEI to help their youth succeed academically though complimentary education, is mirrored in the “achievement-motivation paradox” (Blanden & Macmillan, 2016). This paradox points at the fact that youth from minoritized communities are highly motivated to do well in mainstream education. Yet, educational achievement among minoritized communities remains low and ethnic inequality – or the continues performance inequalities between students with and without a migration background – is and has long been one of the most prominent struggles for many education systems (Hadjar & Gross, 2016).

Many policy actions have been introduced to tackle educational inequality and the achievement gap (Cabral-Gouveia et al., 2023; Jacobs & Danhier, 2017; Louie, 2016). However, much of the research into the causes and the solutions of this issue has focused on mainstream education institutions and actors within them. The role and agency of minoritized communities outside these institutions, and specifically within the education they organise themselves, are heavily overlooked. Although CBEI have been the topic of some research, pointing at potential positive impact on academic achievement (Baldridge et al., 2017; Piqueray, 2019), this field remains limited. It exists of mainly descriptive ethnographical studies and several gaps remain. Particularly in our understanding of the resources and strategies of ethnic-cultural minoritized communities to address the achievement gap themselves through CBEI. A subsequent deep understanding of what mainstream educational actors and policy makers can learn from the work of- and leverage collaborations with - CBEI continues to be largely unexamined.

For the past couple of years we worked on mixed-methodology research addressing some of the gaps in this literature. We have conceptualized CBEI as networks through which resources are made available to students via social relationships in and beyond the organizing ethno-cultural community (Bourdieu, 2018; Yosso 2005). Given that access to necessary resources is one of the main predictors of achievement in education, this network lens is highly relevant (Dika & Singh, 2002; Salloum et al., 2017). Though this qualitative study working with various CBEI we have documented in detail who makes up the social network of these educational spaces, what resources and capital students access through these networks, and how pupils use these to impact their academic achievement. We present the results of this work as well as its implications.

To provide an answer to the research questions posed in this paper, especially those considering the social networks and resources of CBEI we spend documented the various educational processes present in 6 community-based educational initiatives in Flanders, all organised by various ethnic-cultural communities. This documentation process started with building strong and trusting relationships with the various organisers from the schools, aimed at creating a mutual understanding of the research purposes and methods which would be used later in the process, taking inspiration from the participatory research method and the importance of building relationships with the communities we research. Secondly, multiple observations took place of full schooldays with teachers, pupils, parents, and volunteers present. Attention was then turned towards the bulk of the research; capturing the social networks making up these CBEI and the resources present in or made available through these networks. We designed a network-mapping method to fulfil the goal of both capturing the actors present in the CBEI, as well as the personal relationships and proximity between these actors, and the resources made available for all actors involved through the personal relationships (or ties) that made up the social networks. This method combined actor- and resource mapping via concentric circle (Crossley et al., 2015; Yousefi Nooraie et al., 2012; Froehlich et al., 2020) In practice this means that we first asked actors present in the schools (teachers, organisers and pupils) to draw their personal network (egocentric mapping) using a concentric circle-technique which captures both the other actors in the school they are in regular communication with, and the proximity they feel towards these actors. This was then combined with resource-mapping; asking the same actors in the school to also name and list the various resources made available via the interpersonal relationships in the egocentric networks. This method was employed in interviews with teachers and volunteers, and in focus groups with pupils (ranging from 9 to 16 years old). More than 50 interviews took place using this method, resulting in a dataset with observational data and over 70 drawings of personal networks, detailing both the actors present in schools as well as the resources the actors have access to or can be made available to them. This data was coded and analysed in Nvivo, for which we based our deductive coding on the community-cultural wealth framework (Yosso, 2005).

Results from this study showcase that CBEI have expansive social networks, with resources that reach much further than simply the ones made available through the curriculum offered to the pupils. Additionally, not only pupils benefit from the resources present or made available; Parents, teachers and volunteers regularly rely on the social networks of these alternative educational spaces to access resources in or beyond the initiatives. In general, the resources present and available in the studied CBEI can be categorized using the community-cultural wealth framework (Yosso, 2005). We also offer an expansion of this framework with resources that contain the transnational nature of the CBEI included in this research. The paper we aim to present here is only a snapshot of the documented work of CBEI in our study: In this particular paper we focus on the social networks of CBEI and how various CBEI compare in terms of resource availability for pupils which can impact their educational trajectory. We will dive into the larger implications of this work, and CBEI in general, for policymakers and school-community collaborations that can be leveraged in the pursuit of educational equity and justice. We hope to showcase with our broad study that CBEI are important sites of educational innovation that should be valued by social policy makers, teachers, and researchers alike for the important role they play in the lives of minoritized youth and the larger ethnic-cultural communities they belong to.

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