Beyond Integration: How community spaces build migrants’ sense of belonging

Moving beyond abstract policy discussions of “integration,” the session will focus on pragmatic and relational dynamics that unfold in local environments referred to in this workshop as community spaces. These low-threshold community spaces such as libraries, cultural centres, learning hubs and informal gathering places matter to
migrants. Additionally, migrants first encounter systems, build relationships and negotiate their place in society in these spaces. Many people develop a sense of belonging through their engagements with others. However, these spaces can be a double-edged sword for enabling and hindering belonging indirectly.

Workshop structure
This workshop session is a highly participatory experience from start to finish, with the research presentations supporting not only dialogue, but also co-creation among participants. It is structured in three phases: (a) Opening remarks and key insights (b) Exploratory activities for mapping trust and belonging and identifying barriers and blind
spots (c) Co-designing for belonging. The opening activities will invite participants to reflect on trust, comfort, boundaries, and cultural perceptions of trust and proximity Research presentations will highlight tensions such as inclusion versus exclusion, formal structures versus informal interactions, and the role of everyday encounters
within and without community spaces in shaping belonging.The workshop invites paper submissions for up to two additional presenters on related topics. The workshop will conclude with a co-designed and collaborative activity to develop principles and interventions that could strengthen trust and inclusion in community spaces, with special attention to institutional and micro-institutional practices and affirmations of trust building through relationships.

Language and facilitation
The workshop will be facilitated in English. However, participants will be encouraged to engage in multiple languages during group discussions where possible. Multilingual participation will be welcomed as a resource for inclusive dialogue.

How do politically silent first-generation migrants become capable of collective political voice in local governance conflicts, and what role do community spaces play in this transformation? This paper addresses these questions through a qualitative case study of first-generation Chinese migrant restaurateurs in Oxford, Britain, whose businesses were affected by congestion-related transport policies. Rather than treating the case as a straightforward story of bottom-up democratic mobilisation, the paper examines how community spaces convert belonging into political voice, and how collective claim-making, in turn, transforms belonging into a more public and political form.

The study draws on interviews and fieldwork with Chinese restaurant owners, food-business actors, community participants and actors connected to local Chinese networks. The sample includes highly affected participants, highly affected low-participants, weakly affected supporters, weakly affected non-participants, and community brokers. Using a grounded-theory-informed analytical strategy, the research compares cases across two axes: degree of policy impact and degree of participation.

The findings show that policy shock generated grievances, but grievances did not automatically produce political voice. Some strongly affected businesses remained cautious or silent because of language barriers, time pressure, institutional distance, low political efficacy and risk perception. Conversely, some weakly affected actors participated because the issue had been interpreted as a shared community concern. The key mechanism was brokered political voice: ethnic economy leaders and community brokers aggregated fragmented complaints, translated livelihood concerns into institutionally legible claims, and linked first-generation migrants to MPs, councillors and community platforms.

The paper conceptualises restaurant networks, Chinese community organisations, religious groups and second-generation connections as community spaces or relational infrastructures. These spaces do not merely produce a sense of belonging; they create trust, translation capacity and political linkage. The paper therefore argues that belonging and political voice are mutually constitutive: belonging facilitates collective voice, while collective voice reworks belonging into public claim-making within local governance.

Finland’s education policy is designed around the principle of equity, with free access to basic education for all learners, including immigrant learners. Despite this, studies have shown that immigrant learners continue to face multiple barriers that shape their everyday learning experiences in inequitable ways. These barriers reveal a gap between the promise of educational equity and the everyday relational conditions required for immigrant learners and families to participate fully in education in Northern Finland. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operate within this gap by acting as trust brokers, positioning themselves as connective links between families, schools, municipalities, and the wider Finnish system.

The data and findings presented in this paper are based on my master’s thesis, which used a qualitative interpretivist research design. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with seven NGO practitioners from five organisations and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.

The paper draws on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory to position NGOs within the mesosystem, demonstrating how they actively construct connections between home and school, as well as with the wider environments influencing a child’s development. From this perspective, linkages between microsystems and mesosystems are not automatically created; rather, intermediary actors such as NGOs actively build and sustain these linkages.

The findings demonstrate that the trust that NGO practitioners cultivated with families through consistent, personal and non-official relationships created pathways for recognition, participation, and ultimately, belonging. NGOs created structured community spaces where immigrant learners and their families could form connections such as friends’ groups, parents’ groups, community cafés, and women’s living rooms. NGOs deliberately designed these community spaces to reduce the isolation and loneliness that participants consistently described as a barrier to learning and participation in Finnish society. This suggests that the contribution of NGOs to educational equity extends beyond service delivery to the cultivation of belonging itself.

Public libraries are community spaces which aim to be safe and welcoming for people of different backgrounds and offer materials and programmes to meet the needs of their patrons (Dalmer et al., 2022, p.4). They are highly trusted institutions that also play an important role in creating social capital and social trust among immigrants and refugees through library programmes (Vårheim, 2014). The international project ‘Public Library Services for Immigrants and Refugees’ (PubLIB, 2026), which includes all five Nordic countries, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and Croatia, aims to map public libraries’ services, activities and partnerships aimed at immigrant and refugee communities. Quantitative data were collected via online surveys in 2025, from the persons in public libraries in all ten countries, who had the main responsibility for services to the immigrant and refugee populations. The total number of responses was 846, of which 91 were obtained from libraries in Finland.

Questions were, among others, about provided services and programmes, collaborations to develop services, and the perceived roles of librarians while working with immigrants and refugees. Preliminary results show that in Finland, the most common services were providing materials to borrow and computers with internet connection to use. Most libraries paid attention to the increased need for literature and materials in other languages and acquired especially children’s literature. The perceived roles were, however, mainly those of traditional librarians and managers of information, whereas giving other types of support was uncommon. Research has shown that feelings of belonging can only occur with access to services (Dalmer et al., 2022, p.19). Social interaction and belonging were supported by cultural events that were commonly organised, and by providing facilities for events. Many libraries did, however, miss out on other opportunities, as a vast majority did, for example, not organise any language cafés that would facilitate learning and belonging, and support integration.

Finland’s own definition of integration names it as a two-way process, requiring both the
migrant’s own activity and the receptiveness of the receiving society. In practice, only one side
of that process has ever been developed. Drawing on Nicehearts ry’s Neighbourhood Mothers
programme, I show what happens when the receptiveness that was never built has to come
from somewhere else: women who have already lived through isolation, unfamiliar systems,
and institutional mistrust build that missing trust themselves, with women living through it
now, extending it outward toward institutions that have never had to extend anything back.

This asymmetry runs deeper than access. Migrants are routinely expected to just go along
with institutional decisions, rarely being told why something is being done or decided, what
standard they are being measured against, or where the information they share actually ends
up. Through weekly cafés and ongoing one-on-one support, neighbourhood mothers turn
those encounters with authority into something a person can understand and prepare for.

Trust of this kind is not built through a single service encounter. It grows through repeated,
informal contact with someone who has already crossed the same gap, who explains not only
what is being asked, but why, and who remains a consistent, known presence over time rather
than a rotating institutional role. And from there, trust grows into something more: Participant
surveys and neighbourhood mothers’ own reports on their activities and one-on-one helping
cases show how initial trust develops further into a genuine feeling of belonging, first to a
certain neighbourhood mother, then to a Neighbourhood Mothers’ group, and ultimately to
society. That sense of belonging shows up concretely: in a clearer understanding of how
Finland and its systems actually work, in a known person to turn to when something goes
wrong, and, increasingly, in a known service as well, in a shift for many women from being
helped to helping others themselves, and, often, in the instinct to bring someone new into
that same belonging.

Neither trust nor belonging comes from access alone. Finland’s low threshold principle
lowers the formal barrier to walking through a door, but it says nothing about whether a person
trusts, or feels they belong to, what is waiting for them once they do. A low threshold is
meaningless if a person does not trust and does not feel they belong to whatever awaits them
on the other side of it.

Trust and belonging follow the same pattern as integration itself. Each is treated as something
the migrant alone is expected to supply, never something the receiving society has to earn or
help build. That gap points to a question nobody currently asks: was that space ever designed
with someone who does not yet trust the system in mind?

Drawing on ten years of practice and structured programme feedback, this paper argues that
rethinking low threshold is not something institutions can simply design and then extend to
migrants. It is something they would have to develop together with the people who arrive,
learning from what already works in spaces like Neighbourhood Mothers’ activities rather than
adding accessibility on top of a system that was never, to begin with, built with migrants in the
room. The paper closes by exploring what it would take to build trust, and the belonging that
follows from it, before a person ever reaches a service door, not only once they arrive at one.