Antigonish Movement!

So I have not been good at posting and this one is actually about Nova Scotia! So Sorry for the mistakes. I really wanted a post about the Antigonish Movement though. It was a grassroots movement that began in, you guessed it, Antigonish in the 1920s. This movement is important to me because it’s the basis of the Coady International Institute (a.k.a. the lovely people that are sending me overseas). I want to explain the movement in some depth because by doing so I will be able to explain what I’m doing overseas.

Two men, Fr. Moses Coady and Fr. Jimmy Tompkins, started the whole Antigonish Movement, although Moses Coady generally gets more credit and definitely gets quoted more frequently. So you’re probably asking by now, what the heck was this movement? Well, in the 1920s people in Nova Scotia were in desperate economic straits.

Generally, they worked for exploitive middle men who sold their goods, such as fish or coal, at much higher costs than which bought them from the Nova Scotians. Moses Coady and Jimmy Tompkins saw the inherent corruption within in this system. So they said to themselves, “Why bother with these middlemen? The people could do it themselves with a bit of education.” So that’s exactly what they did. Moses Coady began adult education programs surrounding practical skills that would immediately affect the lives of the people. Communities began building their own canneries, selling their products to the market directly, starting credit unions and any other project they felt their community needed. Summed up, Moses Coady preached a message of self-reliance by saying people could be “Masters of their own destiny.”

Now you might ask, “What does this have to do with contemporary development work in Kenya?” Well, the Coady still bases its work on the ideas of its founders. I will be partnering with an organization called Community Research in Environment and Development Initiative (CREADIS). Their work centres on educating people in the Bungoma District of Kenya so that they can help make their communities stronger. This approach to development focuses on looking at a community’s assets in order to improve upon them and make lives better for all. And that’s how I’ve become the newest member of the Antigonish Movement.