This Special Issue of the International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies focuses on emancipatory approaches to youth engagement. Evoking ideas of freedom, release, and liberation, we explore youth engagement as a means to facilitate social change, to improve organizations, and to build healthier communities. Broadening and deepening youth engagement beyond a shift from youth as objects to subjects necessarily entails youth workers and educators grappling with the significance of engaging in respectful and transformative youth-adult relationships. In taking up this agenda, youth and adults collaboratively explore opportunities and obstacles, and make recommendations for extending youth engagement beyond a mere trend or project, to constitute a value system that underlies practice.