Community-based educational spaces (CBES; afterschool programs, community-based youth organizations, etc.) have a long history of interrupting patterns of educational inequity and continue to do so under the current educational policy climate. The current climate of education, marked by neoliberal education restructuring, has left community-based educational spaces vulnerable in many of the same ways as public schools. Considering the current political moment of deep insecurity within public education, this review of research illuminates the role community-based educational spaces have played in resisting forms of educational inequality and their role in the lives of minoritized youth. With a review of seminal education research on community-based spaces, we intend to capture the ways these diverse out-of-school spaces inform the educational experiences, political identity development, and organizing and activist lives of minoritized youth. Further, this piece contends that reimagining education beyond the borders of the school is a form of resistance, as community-based leaders, youth workers, and youth themselves negotiate the dialectical nature of community-based educational spaces within a capitalist and racialized neoliberal state.

After-school community-based spaces are often recognized in political and educational discourse as institutions that “save” and “rescue” Black youth. Such rhetoric perpetuates an ethos of pathology that diminishes the agency of youth and their communities. Through ethnographic research with 20 youth workers at a college completion and youth development after-school program in the urban Northeast, findings indicate that tensions arise as youth workers strive to reimagine Black youth in humanizing ways despite pressures to frame them as broken and in need of fixing to compete for funding with charter schools. Data also reveal deep tensions in youth workers’ experiences as they critique neoliberal reforms that shape their work; yet, at the same time, they are forced to hold students to markers of success defined by neoliberal ideals. These tensions result in youth workers downplaying the social, cultural, and emotional dimensions of their work.

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Community-based youth work, through which young people are engaged in community-based educational spaces (CBES; e.g., after-school programs, out-of-school time settings, youth organizations, etc.), is celebrated for supporting youth academically, socially, culturally, and politically. However, when these spaces receive attention, their social and political complexity is often overlooked. Studying the complexity of community-based youth work in education requires interrogating the multiple systems of oppression that impact young people’s lives. It also demands examination of the sociopolitical context of youth work, including how race logics and economic pressures inform the construction of CBES and how these forces surface and intersect with market logics and educational policy reform. Building on existing scholarship on community-based youth work and my current research, I present the youthwork paradox, a framework that captures the complexity of the field and its relationship to structural forces and larger systems of oppression. I detail how this paradox does not always lead to dichotomous discourses; rather, CBES can encompass many logics at once. To illuminate the usefulness of this framework for deeper theorizing of community-based youth work, I ground this concept in an empirical case focused on Black youth workers.