The project was founded in 1975 as a national information clearinghouse for grassroots activists involved with urban and rural poverty issues.
In an initial consultation, Jim Morin, who worked with the Canadian News Synthesis publication, proposed a voluntary collective organization for the project and became the first coordinating editor, who focused upon publishing analytical abstracts of the diagnosis and strategies being developed by grassroots activists, in order to circulate their work on a national level to promote networking, learning and collaboration.
The project disseminated information through the newsletter-format Connexions Digest, which received documents and materials from participants across the country, and distilled them into a subject-indexed summary format.
Print-based for the first two decades of its existence, Connexions published more than 4,000 abstracts summarising the content of documents, articles, reports, and books, as well as profiles of organizations and projects, becoming in the process a resource and networking tool for Canadian activists and researchers concerned with social justice issues.
Connexions hosts the complete archive of The Red Menace, a libertarian socialist newsletter published from 1976 to 1980 by the Libertarian Socialist Collective, as well as a partial archive of Seven News, a community newspaper founded by community activists associated with John Sewell, the Toronto alderman who later to become reform mayor of Toronto.
Connexions declares itself opposed to censorship and to all forms of discrimination and oppression based on gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or race.
Connexions realizes that the stories of the poor and oppressed differ radically from those of the typical Canadian as portrayed in mainstream culture."