We farewell our AOD champion, Jan Spence

Jan Spence retires as AOD Manager at Christchurch City Mission

The middle-aged man was disheveled and really downtrodden. He slept rough out on the streets and you could tell. His life was miserable and he had been massively hurt by abuse and trauma. He drank very heavily to escape his demons.

On this day many years ago he walked slowly to the door of our Thorpe House detox unit and was met by Jan Spence. She brought him in, sat him down, made him a cup of tea, and talked to him about what he could achieve by coming into Thorpe House.

“He was still for a moment,” she says, “then he burst into tears.” “I asked him why he was crying and he said ‘because you are treating me with respect’.” From that moment on he began making small steps of improvement in his troubled life.

Respect. Equality. Acceptance. These are the qualities the City Mission stands for and they are why many people feel safe turning to us for help.

They also go right to the heart of how Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) manager Jan Spence treated clients, staff and colleagues in her 22 years with us. Jan has left a magnificent legacy of work in the mental health and addiction area.

“The philosophy we have is treating people with respect. Nobody is better than anyone else. We have people off the street, politicians, lawyers, all walks of life with addiction problems. Everybody is entitled to support,” she says firmly.

Jan came to us in 2002 with the right skills and a clear vision already well developed. She had trained as a psychiatric nurse because she always had an interest in psychiatry and people's behaviour.
“How life impacts on people's lives” fascinated her more than the medical side of nursing.

Husband Alan ran a trucking firm, Ted Spence and Sons, and the couple raised two children. Jan stepped back from psychiatric nursing to teach special needs children at Heathcote Valley School to give her more time with the family.

Then she joined us as the Thorpe House supervisor in 2002, stepping into a role that had needed consistent leadership for a number of years. Things were a bit chaotic, but she got stuck in and - as she puts it - got things back on track.

The next step in her City Mission journey came six years later when former Missioner Michael Gorman appointed her as the AOD manager.

Back then our entire AOD team, including Wahine Whai Ora, numbered under 10 staff, including just one youth and one adult counsellor. Jan knew what she wanted – higher quality services, connected services, extended community outreach coverage to keep the support going after detox, and all these things depended on her building networks outside the Mission and most importantly getting the right staff. “It was a real battle at the start,” she says. “At the end of the day I used to have to stand on the pavement outside and let it go before I stepped off the pavement and went home or else I would have gone mad.”

With staff she always looked for empathy, passion, qualifications, knowledge and experience working with people with mental health and addiction problems, and generally just being the right fit for the service. They needed people skills, they needed to be non-judgmental and they needed to fit into the wider Mission. “I have that philosophy. We are part of the City Mission, we are not just an AOD team, we are not a silo, we are not working in isolation, we need to be part of the Mission plus part of a wider sector and the community because that’s where our patients end up.”

When Jan began, AOD teams across Christchurch worked with little connection and competed against each other for funding. That all changed after the earthquakes when the government forced them together and told them to sort it out.

“We did and that started the collaborative approach that exists today,” Jan says. She took this as an opportunity and embraced it, lifting the City Mission AOD profile right across the city and wider. And the result has been good for our AOD team.

“We have lots of fingers in different pies,” Jan says. “We are deeply involved in shared initiatives, we have leadership roles across the sector, we have maintained a high profile as an agency and as a result we attract funding.”

Our AOD team has grown to become one of the biggest in the city and has developed a national reputation for expertise and our layered approach to helping clients. Each month we handle about 100 new referrals, including 20 youth, and over a year we will treat more than 2500 clients. In fact it is because things are going well and our position is so strong that Jan has felt the time is right to step away. “I think you know when the time is right and you can see for yourself, you get to an age where it's time to do something else in terms of grandchildren and your own health and well-being, looking after each other in terms of your husband.”

 She leaves knowing there has also been a lot of ground gained in reducing stigma, which has always been one of her targets. As she says, mental health and addiction problems should be regarded as just like a broken bone and healed with the right treatment. “It’s not as socially acceptable as a physical illness. I had this passion to make a difference in the lives of people who were suffering with mental health and addiction problems.” She clearly has done this.

Each day when she wakes she thinks of something she is grateful for because that positive little moment sets the day up so well. Everyone should do it, she believes. If you are stuck for one, just be grateful you are still alive, she says with that well-known laugh. Ask if she is proud of what she has achieved, she looks uncomfortable. She doesn’t like the conversation to stray too far from her beloved team. “You don’t really focus on yourself, but if I stop and think about it, I think there has been a lot happening that I have been involved with and that gives me pride,” she says. “Pride in what we have achieved as a team,” she adds, of course.