Antigonish Movement

The Antigonish Movement blended adult education, co-operatives, microfinance and rural community development to help small, resource-based communities around Canada’s Maritimes improve their economic and social circumstances. A group of priests and educators, including Father Jimmy Tompkins, Father Moses Coady, Rev. Hugh MacPherson and A.B. MacDonald led this movement from a base at the Extension Department at St. Francis Xavier University (St. F.X.) in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

The credit union systems of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and PEI owe their origins to the Antigonish Movement, which also had an important influence on other provincial systems across Canada. The Coady International Institute at St. F.X. has been instrumental in developing credit unions and in asset-based community development initiatives in developing countries ever since.

As educators and priests, the leaders of the Antigonish Movement were primarily concerned with human and spiritual development. The title of Moses Coady’s only book – Masters of Their Own Destiny – encapsulates this desire to see ordinary Nova Scotians achieve economic and social freedom.

However Coady argued that for practical reasons "we consider it good pedagogy and good psychology to begin with the economic phase ... that we may more readily attain the spiritual and cultural towards which all our efforts are directed."

Ordinary Nova Scotians he argued, had only themselves to blame for their poverty and vulnerability. They had permitted money and business to become mysterious forces outside of their control. Fishers and farmers for example, were exploited by marketing middlemen. Everyone was exploited by moneylenders. If they took the time to understand their circumstances and took the risks of co-operative action, they could achieve economic security and on that foundation greater freedom and self-realization. In a vision that has been renewed today in digital forms of mass collaboration, Coady argued that "the only hope of democracy is that enough noble, independent, energetic souls may be found who are prepared to work overtime, without pay" in order to shape a free and prosperous society.

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