When Policy Meets Practice: A Study of Ethnic Community-Based Organizations for Children and Youth

Abstract

State-supported ethnic community-based organizations (CBOs) for children and youth develop within the framework of the Norwegian tradition of voluntary organization. This chapter shows that both the government and the ethnic CBOs perceive the organizations as an arena for cultural and social activities among young people who are growing up in migrancy , whether they are immigrant youth or Norwegian-born children of immigrants . The state and the CBOs differ, however, in their perceptions about the purpose of establishing special ethnic community-based organizations for children and youth. Some members of these organizations were born in Norway, but the government places the organizations within a migrancy framework in its financial funding scheme. In line with the Nordic tradition of voluntary organization, the government perceives the cultural and social activities within ethnic CBOs as a stepping-stone to individual democratic participation in the larger society. This policy is ambiguous. In contrast, the ethnic CBOs work to maintain their members’ cultural heritage, and may at times contest the Norwegian understanding of voluntary organizations as a stepping-stone to individual participation in the larger society. The chapter concludes that the CBOs not only maintain the state’s migrancy framework, but also refuse the government’s idea of integration as a process taking place within nation-state boundaries.