The Interamerican Cooperative Institute

A legacy inspired by Catholic Social Teaching

By Tom Walsh
January/February 2013

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A lesson learned by Scarboro missionary Fr. Harvey Steele, founder of the Interamerican Cooperative Institute (ICI) in Panama, was that community leaders need formation and education in order to succeed. Inspired by the work of Fr. Moses Coady in Cape Breton and in Northeastern Nova Scotia (Antigonish Diocese), Fr. Steele believed that Catholic Social Teaching and skills-building were instruments towards achieving this success.

Frs. Coady and Steele were using terms such as “agents of social transformation” and “artisans of their own destiny”—language articulated in the Vatican II document, Populorum Progressio, in reference to the poor and disadvantaged—before these words became common in development circles. Fr. Steele understood that ICI and the cooperative movement allowed the Church at a very practical level to develop its social dimension, a legacy that today 48 years later has become an essential component of diocesan pas-toral activity throughout the Caribbean and Latin America.

As someone ahead of his time, Padre Pablo, as he was affectionately known in Latin America, in 1964 envisioned ICI as being a place for Latin American unity. At ICI, community leaders from Central and South America and the Caribbean could share ideas and experiences, debating and proposing the type of society that they wanted. At the time Latin America was living one of its darkest moments, governed by US-supported military dictatorships that treated social movements harshly. Graduates from ICI are among the many martyrs of the Latin American Church, who upon returning to their countries were murdered for defending this right to participate in the construction of a new society. In part, this new society and Latin American unity has come a long way in these past 48 years and the thousands of community leaders who passed through ICI’s classrooms contributed to this social transformation. That both the Church and society have benefited from this contribution is part of ICI’s and Scarboro Missions’ legacy.

After ten years of regular operations, ICI recognized that a society without the full participation of women would never be equitable and consequently made gender equality an institutional policy. The immediate goal was that 50 percent of the students attending the courses were to be women. In Latin America’s macho society this was a lofty goal as rural women leaders seldom left their communities, let alone travelled to a distant country for three months of training and skills building. Yet, the goal was soon reached and during the past 37 years thousands of ICI graduates have been women from the poorest and most vulnerable sectors who today manage and lead some of the largest cooperatives in Latin America. They too have contributed to major political changes where women participate at the highest levels. Today the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica are women as they have been in the recent past in Chile, Panama, and Nicaragua. Nicaragua now has a 50/50 law where political parties are obliged to have gender equality fairly distributed among all electoral positions.

As ICI evolved in its thinking and methods, its legacy grew. Perhaps ICI’s greatest legacy and one that Scarboro Missions can be justly proud of, is that in 2010, after 46 years of uninterrupted activity led by Scarboro Missions, the Institute became an autonomous organization with Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez of Honduras as its President and Carlos Lee of Panama as its Executive Director. While the nature of the partnership has changed, Scarboro Missions remains actively involved with two of its priest members par-ticipating on the Board of Directors. This is a transitional time for ICI to strengthen its institutional capacity and renew its programming in the midst of enormous changes happening in Latin America and globally. It is in this challenging context that ICI’s mission remains relevant, with the need as great as ever to prepare agents for social transformation, inspired by Catholic Social Teaching and envisioned by Fr. Harvey Steele.

Tom Walsh joined Scarboro Missions in 1975 and was missioned to Peru where he met his wife Julia. The family was later missioned to Panama and Ecuador, serving in mission for more than 30 years. Today, Tom works for CAFOD, the official Catholic aid agency for England and Wales, as the Regional Representative for Central America and Mexico. He and Julia live in Nicaragua

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