After decades of sharing his thoughts, opinions and lessons learned with the community, Dr. Alwin Spence is taking a break from writing a regular column for the Community Contact.

In an interview, Spence said he was among the first people to encourage Contact founder Egbert Gaye when Gaye was mulling over creating a newspaper dedicated to telling the stories of Quebec’s Black and Caribbean community.

Soon after the paper got off the ground, the pair developed the concept for Spence’s column. It started off as an occasional offering and in recent years became a regular sight on the paper’s pages.

He said writing the column was a way to meet the community and introduce new kinds of thinking.

“I felt I had something to say, something the people would like to hear,” he said.

Spence, a counselling psychologist, holds a doctorate in psychology and taught full-time at John Abbott College for 40 years. He also taught part-time at Concordia University, his alma mater.
His columns often touched on current affairs, social issues and initiatives he thought were worthy of being spotlighted. The goal, he said, was to relate to the widest possible audience — young, old and everyone in between.
Response to his columns was always good, he said — church members at Union United, where he is a member, would bring up his columns and praise him for what he wrote and said they looked forward to reading.
He said one thing he learned over the years is people like having information, and they enjoyed that the topics he wrote about were relevant to their lives.

“It’s something they can relate to,” he said.

He said there need to be more community initiatives that provide older folks with opportunities to get out of their homes and socialize. While Union United offers that kind of programming for seniors, he said not everyone in the church community participates, and that people from outside the church community could and should be invited to participate as well.

“Many of them are lonely people and they could take the extra (time) for these kinds of activities, to socialize,” he said.
It’s a topic that is important to him, and one he has spoken about many times, including as a keynote speaker at the Council for Black Aging Community of Montreal’s 19th annual conference in 2024.

As he steps away from writing the column, he has a message for the community at large, one that will sound familiar to his regular readers. He said to keep working together, because when a group is organized people respect it, and people support it.

“Division doesn’t make much sense. Cooperation, working together, you will achieve.”