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Originally established in 1978 by the Ontario Woodsworth
Memorial Foundation, this award is currently being funded
by the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation. Recipients of this
scholarship are recognized for their outstanding academic
record and service to Woodsworth College.
Web site:
http://www.wdw.utoronto.ca/
James Shaver Woodsworth
who was born in Etobicoke, Ontario, in 1874 and moved
with his family in 1885 to Brandon, Manitoba, where
his father was Superintendent of Methodist missions
in Western Canada.
The young Woodsworth
was ordained as a Methodist minister in 1896 and spent
two years as a circuit preacher in Manitoba before going
to study at Victoria College in Toronto and Oxford University
in England.
Observing industrial
capitalism in Canada and Britain and its failure to
meet the needs of working people, Woodsworth came to
the view that personal salvation did nothing to right
great social and economic wrongs that were so evident
in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Later, while working
with immigrant slum dwellers in Winnipeg between 1904
and 1913, he wrote extensively, and spoke of a "Social
Gospel" which called for the Kingdom of God "here
and now". By 1914 he had become an ardent socialist
and an admirer of the British Labour Party.
He was also a pacifist,
seeing war as a product of capitalist and imperial competition,
and he was fired from a government social research position
in 1917 for openly opposing conscription. By 1918 he
had resigned the ministry in protest against the church's
support of the First World War. To look after his young
family he worked as a longshoreman on the Vancouver
docks for a year.
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