Participating from the ground up: a case study of a co-ethnic association for Filipino migrants as a pathway-building organisation

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the civic capacity of an organisation formed by migrants to act as an intermediary between co-ethnics and the host country. By presenting a case study of a co-ethnic association for Filipino migrants in a regional part of Japan with a qualitative data set, I explore how and why older migrants support co-ethnics while working collaboratively with the local community. This paper shows that the association as an intermediary does not just fill gaps, but engages co-ethnics and Japanese locals in the organisational growth of its volunteer work. The bottom-up work of the association not only exposes but also complements inadequacies in existing structures in the host country to build a constructive interdependence between co-ethnics and the local community. This highlights the pathway-building capacity of a co-ethnic association to effect change to migrants' participation in the host country.KEYWORDS: Co-ethnic associationspathwaysFilipino migrantsJapancivic engagement AcknowledgementsI thank Dr. Timothy Marjoribanks and two anonymous reviewers for providing comments in the development of this paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Ethics declarationsThe author reports that she did not have ethical approval from an ethics committee for this research. The author conducted research in Japan where ethics clearance is legally mandated for medical research, but not for research in social science. In addition, the institution in which the author conducts research has not set up an ethics committee. While this is the case, she carried out her study after obtaining informed consent from all her participants, and observing other elements of ethical research practice, for example, protecting the confidentiality of participants.Additional informationFundingThis work was funded by JSPS KAKENHI [grants number 20K13717 and 23K12630].