When education professor Yvette Daniel and her team across five sites envisioned the Tikkun Youth Project, which brought together youth and university researchers, activists, and community organizers world-wide to lead to positive social change, they knew its legacy would continue long after the project had ended.

Unlike some projects that find their way to publication after the research is completed, Tikkun planted the publishing seeds long before the research began.

The Tikkun team had dreams to preserve the energy and determination of the collaboration in a book as a means to keep the dialogue around healing and repair and civic engagement in motion.

“I knew, like the concept of Tikkun, the book would come together one step at a time,” said Dr. Daniel. “With our research partners working around the globe, we needed a mechanism to bring all of our research together for the final book.”

To facilitate the publishing process, Leddy Library prepared an electronic submission form to allow the authors of Tikkun to submit, review, and edit their chapters. Mita Williams, scholarly communications librarian, worked with Daniel to streamline the process and prepare the book for open access publication.

“The future of publishing scholarly monographs must involve some form of open access,” said Williams. “It allows readers to enjoy anthologies of global voices and long-form works that can change or challenge existing disciplines.”

Since the project wrapped up in 2017, many of the youth participants who contributed to Tikkun are continuing the work they started. Now that the publication is complete, the team hopes that the book and their experiences will equip participants to broaden the message and get more youth involved in civic engagement activities in their local communities.

“The publication of this open access book will allow us to reach a broader swath of youth in various communities, to inspire them to take on leadership roles,” said Daniel. “We want them to know that every small step in making a change counts in the larger scheme of things.”

After roughly four years in the making, the final publication of Tikkun Beyond Borders: Connecting Youth Voices, Leading Change is now available in digital and print formats.

—Marcie Demmans