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On a cold blustery summer’s afternoon Rebecca Hamer and I found ourselves sitting in Pret. Unfortunately, we were sitting in different ones. Unbeknownst to me there are in fact three Prets between the station and our office, and I had failed to communicate the exact location of the coffee shop of choice. Third time lucky – after an unfortunate incident involving a poor unsuspecting blonde Phoebe lookalike – we arrived at the same place.

Many of you will be familiar with Rebecca - either as one of the speakers at the Youthwork Summit or as the winner of the ‘Youth Worker of the Year Award’ at last year’s Youth Work Awards. Others will simply know her as the coordinator of The SPACE Project in Harrow. The SPACE Project – a small local outreach project based at St. Peter’s Church – was principally a listening project for young women with low self-esteem. Based on the Acorn Christian Model of refl ective listening, this form of mentoring involves picking out feeling words, refl ecting them back to the young person, and then summarising their thoughts at the end. ‘You don’t tell them what to do’, Rebecca explains, ‘You enable young people to hear themselves.’

The SPACE Project is fairly young, celebrating its third birthday this year. Processes are still being worked out, but the listening model has proved effective. Rebecca began by explaining something of the motivation behind the project. ‘Every youth worker or mentor who is working with a young person is seeking to empower that person. That’s why we do the job. But I guess it’s quite a pure form of empowerment. Often as a youth worker I have found that I have had to check my motivations. Do I want to give an answer to her because I have a need to help her, or because I genuinely want to help her? My answer might not be the solution they need; they are the experts on their own lives. It really relies and trusts in young people’s own resources. What I saw in the volunteers’ training for the listening (even if only as a foundation for mentoring) was that they had to face why they wanted to support young people. It was really helpful in training them to wait to see if the answer is lying dormant in the person, rather than spoon feeding the answers all the time.’

As Rebecca chats about the listening model I’m reminded of school, and the way in which we learn things. Back in my maths days – before I was able to drop the subject as soon as I was given the chance – the equations and formulas that stayed in my head were the ones that I had figured out. If I managed to solve a problem, I was far more likely to remember it and be able to apply it in future, than if I had simply copied the notes of the person next to me (which happened fairly regularly). Equally – my youth group, sometimes frustratingly, are far better at remembering the things that they have said than the things that I have said.

It’s the same with the listening model. Rebecca explained that the young person is, ‘having to fi nd the solution themselves. They have to problem solve. And once you have problem solved once, you can possibly do it again. You have been given the confidence to believe that you can problem solve the situation. That you can do this. It empowers them to use their minds in a way that they haven’t done before. And we live our thoughts – so to give young people the space to think for themselves is a powerful thing. Of course there is a time for intervention, and of course there is time for guidance – and someone may be coming to conclusions that aren’t right. But the challenge for me is listen first. Because more often than not it’s enough.’

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Reflecting on winning the Youth Worker of the Year Award, Rebecca admitted to feeling a bit ‘awkward’ about it. ‘It’s an odd thing because no youth worker is an island. And I know I’m only a good youth worker because of the good youth workers who have trained me – so winning an award for you being the ‘youth worker of the year’ feels really strange, and unrepresentative. But of course – that’s the case for everybody! I felt at fi rst like I didn’t deserve it, then that nobody deserves it, and then I began to feel that everyone deserves it. Every youth worker slogging their guts out across the country deserves to know that God loves them and that they are doing a good job. It came at the right time for me. It was a massive encouragement.’

Since winning the award last year The SPACE Project has grown to include an eight-week course for 14-19 year-olds with low self-esteem, called True2U. ‘We now run True2U with a small group of girls. And we only take girls who do actually have low self-esteem; we measure this using a scale called the Rosenberg scale. We take this small group through eight weeks of thinking about how their thoughts and feelings are connected: why we end up in the same situations, what’s driving our thinking. It gently gives them the space - when they’re ready - to start to challenge some of their strongly held negative beliefs about themselves. It’s not aimed at changing people over night. But we have seen some incredible results. Seven of the eight girls who took the course began with measurably low self-esteem and ended with measurably healthy or high selfesteem. There is a great diff erence between confidence and self-esteem. Some young people are very confident but their overall self-esteem is quite low. Or sometimes we think they have low self-esteem but actually they may just have low confidence in some areas of their life.’

‘I remember meeting this young girl when I fi rst started and she was talking about how negatively she felt about herself. And I had a lot of time and respect for her – and was like, “But you’re brilliant! You’re so worth it! You’ve got all of these gifts and talents!” She just couldn’t hear any of it. And of course she couldn’t. She probably thought I was lying for starters. But also to say to someone with low self-esteem, ‘you’re so valuable’ just makes them think, “Oh great, now I’m stupid as well. I’m thinking the wrong way. I should be thinking that I’m valuable.” It’s just another confirmation that they have got it wrong. They need to hear that they are valuable, but they need to be ready to hear it.’

I have certainly experienced both sides of this coin. On the one hand I’ve been on the receiving end of the ‘You’re great!’ comments – and been left feeling as if they are empty, hollow words that roll off the tongue without much substance behind them. I’ve also been prey to the thinking that all a person with low self-esteem needs is to be showered with praise and adoration. On one occasion I was so convinced of the efficacy of this approach that I tried to speak as many encouragements as possible over one particular girl in one short youth group session. The poor girl. Once again this comes back to our need to be the ‘answer’ to other people’s problems. Rebecca continued, ‘It comes back to that listening thing – why can’t we listen? This person feels that they aren’t worth anything. So let’s stay with that, let’s acknowledge it - saying, “That must be really hard – how does that feel?” Let’s stay there with them in it. I love Henry Nouwen’s book The Life of the Beloved. He talks about befriending our pain. I love that. He says the key to our healing lies in our pain. So if we can befriend the pain of our young people, then maybe we can help them to fi nd the keys to their own healing. We also need to remember that we are not counsellors. The listening deals with the present – but if it becomes always about the past, then we have to be signposting young people to counselling. All of this edges towards therapeutic youth work so we need to be very clear about boundaries. Youth work is a beautiful role because it stands between teacher, counsellor, pastor, friend, sister – but we have to be extra careful about knowing what our role is.’

As SPACE is connected to St. Peter’s Church, it would be easy to assume that it is an ‘outreach’ project in the typical evangelistic sense. I asked Rebecca what the overall vision was behind this project – is it to ‘convert’ people? ‘We are motivated by a Christian faith and operate within that framework but don’t impose the beliefs of that framework on the young people we work with. The story that inspires me, as an example of something being faith-based but not faith-biased, is the story of the healing of the ten lepers. Jesus heals the ten lepers, they all go their separate ways, and then one comes back and says: “You are the Son of God”. Only then do they have a conversation about who Jesus is. The heart of The SPACE Project is to offer healing to any young person of any background. Our context provides an excellent process for young people to do that. They come in through the medical centre, and often aren’t even aware they are in the church building. Some of them come back and say, “There’s something more to this”, or “Is this a church? I’ve been thinking about God recently.” My heart is that we would have those conversations but not manipulate those conversations. I’m so aware that the young people we work with are so vulnerable that it would be a terrible model of discipleship to talk about Jesus from the fi rst time you meet them – because they want to please you. A faith built on someone else’s faith is no faith at all. My vision is to write a follow up course to True2U called MorethanU– which would take girls at the end of the course and say, “Great – we’re all done and we can finish here, but there is another way we can think about identity. If there was a God who was real, who loved you and chose you – would that make a diff erence to how you feel about yourself?” MorethanU would create the opportunity for opt-in conversations where young people can choose to explore that. And the Holy Spirit is so in the healing. He was in the healing of the nine lepers who didn’t come back.'

I was intrigued to know what Rebecca’s own journey with self-esteem has been. She told me that, ‘Everyone is on a journey with self-esteem, because of our broken human nature. All of us, in some way, wonder whether we are good enough or as good as the next person. That’s something I felt keenly as a teenager, and sometimes still do today. I’ve been on a real journey with exploring how realistic that belief really is, and asking God to show me the truth of who I am. In the past, it’s manifested as perfectionism, working way too hard – and it sometimes still does. One thing that I have found really helpful is to ground myself in God’s word. One of the meanings of my name is ‘the good wife’, and I’ve always been really drawn to Proverbs 31 for that reason. In that passage it says, “Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value.” So whenever I feel the ‘I’m not good enough’ thinking coming into play, I allow the Holy Spirit to say to me: “My husband (Jesus) has full confidence in me and lacks nothing of value.” God has said that he trusts me and values me. And if God values and trusts me, then I can value and trust myself. Whatever I say in this interview, whatever I do or don’t do – whether I fail or succeed – he has full confidence in me.’

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Looking at Rebecca, sat across from me, I find it hard to imagine her struggling with self-esteem. She seems to have everything going for her. But that’s exactly the point – exactly the thing that we need to get our heads around as people who work with young people. It doesn’t matter how brilliant, talented and beautiful our young people are – they may not believe it or see it. They may appear confi dent but really are suffering under the surface. And that may be true for us too. As Rebecca said, we are all on a journey with this one.

Rebecca Hamer is last year’s Youth Worker of the Year. Have you nominated someone for the Youth Work Awards yet? With plenty of categories and great prizes to win - make sure you check out www.youthworkawards.co.uk for more details.