Heather Bellamy spoke with Tamsin Evans, the Founder and CEO of Pure Creative Arts about how to find what your place is in this world and how to step out into it.

Tamsin: We take theatre and education productions into schools, looking at how to talk about issues facing young people, like the ones I mentioned before. We've got a number of different touring productions that we take into schools. We find that the theatre gives an opportunity for them to watch and have moments of revelation, when they think, 'That's like me', or, 'That's going on with me' and, 'I've not talked to anyone about that'. You don't necessarily talk to people if you are struggling with areas around sex, or around how you look, or cutting yourself. So off the back of watching that performance they can feel like someone else understands what they are going through.

Then we use different workshop techniques off the back of that to help people talk about those things and look at practical ways to cope. It depends on the subject and what we are dealing with, but we use workshops to work through those areas with young people.

Then off the back of that we have a number of ongoing programmes. We have a mentoring programme working with young men on male identity. We have another programme called Pure Freedom that looks at issues of eating disorders and self-harming behaviours, or mental health areas like depression, or low self-esteem. They are programmes that will run for about 12 weeks. We also do mentoring work as well.

Heather: How many young people do you work with in a year?

Tamsin: Oh that's a good question! A recent statistic was about 4,900 in a year. I'm not sure exactly what last year's was, but it would be around that. It depends on which variants of work we are doing more of, so whether we are doing more of the ongoing projects, which means we are working with less people, because they are in smaller groups; or whether we are doing more of the bigger scale productions in that year and they are done to 200 people at a time.

Heather: What has been the effect that your work has had on young people?

Tamsin: We've seen some incredible things happen. I'm based in New York now, establishing the work here, but when I was in the UK at a production recently, a girl ran out of the production we were doing on sex and relationships. A teacher came and got me and said would you come and speak with her? So I spent a bit of time talking to her. She was crying, shaking and just uncontrollably upset. My heart broke for her. We sat and chatted and I asked her some questions and her friend was with her as well. In the time that I spent with her she was able to disclose something to me that had happened to her that she hadn't been able to tell anybody about. It had been locking her up and stopping her from being able to live her life. Her friend knew about it, but she had never told anybody else. I don't think her friend really knew how to handle it. So even just telling me; the point when she actually spoke it out, you could just see this weight lifting off her.

I was able to talk to her about shame and about the cross. I was able to talk to her about ways that she could get follow up as well and look with the school about how she could get regular mentoring. I could pray with her as well. So that was amazing, seeing something that had been bottled up deep down in her, through watching the production that it came out. She wasn't afraid of that coming out and then she walks away very different.

It's amazing seeing God work in that way. That would be one example through our productions and we see lots of things like that all the time.

Another example would be through our mentoring programme Courageous, which is the mentoring programme for young men. It's a course we were running at a school with guys that were at risk of exclusion and that the school were concerned would end up in juvenile prison. Within this group, there was one lad that one of my team, Elikem, was working with; he was always putting on a front and not that easy to work with. In the Courageous course they do sessions, but also have someone on one-to-one mentoring as well, after the session. In one of these sessions, probably midway through the course, Elikem had a conversation with this lad. He opened up and told Elikem about how he had got in a position where he had ended up putting his hands around his Mum's throat to harm her. He was so ashamed and so upset with himself that this had happened and that his anger had got so out of control. In this situation Elikem was able to work out what had been happening in the family. This lad had come from a family where his Mum had lots and lots of different partners and his dad wasn't at home. There was a lot of anger and a lot of hurt. This anger had come out and he had been scared by the way it had happened. Obviously that's quite a serious thing to happen. Elikem was able to work with the school to get support for this lad and support for his family, but also as that lad was able to talk about what was going on, he actually saw a real change in him. What he said off the back of that is, "I know now that I can do something. I have more faith that I can go on and do something and I have more hope for my future". That was a great outcome for his life.

Heather: So what has been the response to your book so far?

Tamsin: It's been really encouraging. It was really encouraging at Spring Harvest too. Myself and the team were doing some performance at Spring Harvest this year and I was doing a bit of speaking. It was great because it sold out, so a lot of people were buying it there.

There have been a lot of different messages that I have received and people talking about how it inspired them and helped them realise that they are made for a purpose and that there is something that they can do.

What I am really passionate about in the book is that I wanted it to be really raw and be really real...just telling a real story of what it looks like to say, "Okay God, here I am. I'll be obedient to whatever you are saying and I will follow that and pursue that". I also wanted to be real and honest about the mistakes along the way. I think so often we live in such a celebrity culture where we are so often looking up to people and that happens within Church too. What is really important is to realise that nobody is perfect and that we are not called to live some perfect life. It's about obedience and when we make mistakes, then we learn through mistakes and we grow.