The chapter critiques prevailing hierarchies that associate modern European languages with skills and community or home languages with heritage. It reports on engagement work with schools that showed how home multilingualism can be recognised as a potential skill while also embedding a view of language in an ideology of pluralism. A survey of local supplementary schools that teach community languages shows how pluralistic ideologies are embraced as staff engage with clients of multiple backgrounds. Language becomes a disaporic stance, a practice around which networks of connections are built. Reflection on the multilingual environment and on multilingual experiences and encounters offers opportunities to explore the disconnect between language and place and between language and predefined community boundaries.

This chapter presents an overview of the different models of community-organized heritage language programs ranging from Saturday/Sunday Schools and language camps to e-learning platforms that serve diasporic post-immigration communities. Using various examples of currently existing programs from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, this review identifies characteristics of community-organized heritage language programs that set them apart from other language education programs such as foreign language courses for heritage language speakers and maintenance bilingual programs that exist within the infrastructure of mainstream schooling. It discusses the current state of knowledge that surrounds the functions and roles of community-organized heritage language programs as well as some commonly encountered institutional and operational challenges in such programs. It concludes with a discussion of current work that is being done to support, connect, and promote the interests of community-organized heritage language programs in order to increase their alignment and visibility so that they may more effectively accomplish the goals of heritage language education within and across nations.