Moses Michael Coady (3 January 1882 – 28 July 1959) was a Roman Catholic priest, adult educator and co-operative entrepreneur best known for his instrumental role in the Antigonish Movement.

As a youth he was very concerned at the scale of outmigration from the valley: young men and women leaving for the steel mills and coal mines, or taking up jobs as domestics in the "Boston States".

Emigration from Nova Scotia continued, and Coady fought against a kind of "weird pessimism (that) so benumbed everybody that nothing has been attempted to break the spell.

[4] The report of the MacLean Commission was catalytic: in late 1928 St. FX organized an Extension Department to carry adult education to the people of the province, appointing Coady as its first director.

Through the years of the Antigonish Movement, financial support came from St. FX, the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation (two New York-based charities), and the local Scottish Catholic Society.

Through the new department, Coady linked adult education with co-operative business ventures in the distinctive blend that became known as the Antigonish Movement.

The clubs helped people to plan and then successfully launch co-operatives in many fields: agricultural marketing, fish canning, dairy, retail sales and housing.

It promoted canneries and provided cooperative marketing services to fishermen to help them capture a greater share of the profit from their catch.

The farmers, fishers and miners who formed the backbone of the movement had little access to credit before the Great Depression, and lost what little they had as the downturn started to bite.

That year Coady, MacDonald and Bergengren visited the fishing village of Broad Cove, where they helped the residents form the first credit union in the Maritimes.

By 1936 Coady was increasingly traveling beyond the Maritimes to Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, where his speeches and ideas helped ignite local credit union movements.

By the end of World War II credit unions and other co-operatives dotted the Maritimes, transforming the lives of thousands of people.

As the co-ops gradually became larger and more professional, many ordinary members lost their connection, and reverted to the ‘weird pessimism’ that had bothered Coady in his youth.

"Coady’s belief in the power of ideas to change the hearts and actions of men and women came up against … the petty, patronage-ridden political system in Nova Scotia in the 1930s.

Alexandre Boudreau, a co-operative leader from the region of Chéticamp in Cape Breton claimed that Coady kept Acadians out of important positions in the Antigonish Movement.

And while acknowledging their debt to Coady and to the study club approach, Acadians felt like outsiders in the New Brunswick Credit Union League.

By contrast, the mantle of Alphonse Desjardins was inherited by very able successors like Cyrille Vaillancourt whose leadership and innovation continued to drive the Quebec movement from one success to the next.

"[13] As historian Ian MacPherson shows in the case of British Columbia (another very successful province), enduring success results from multi-faceted roots – which in that case included active participation by an active agricultural cooperative system, urban unions, farmers organizations, the Catholic Church, private welfare groups and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation.

Because study clubs increased the willingness and ability of poorer people to participate, they were one of the most significant innovations in credit unions since the first were formed by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen in rural Germany in 1864.

(1893-1952), the Assistant Director of the Extension Department under Coady, rose to national leadership in the Union in 1945, from whence he led an increasing international engagement on behalf of Canadians.

[15] Coady described MacDonald as a brilliant man, capable of organizing and maintaining a far-flung network of study clubs and cooperatives, who had a "keen and penetrating mind, always ahead of the people yet practical enough to keep within the range of what was possible.