Gabriel-Alphonse Desjardins (1854-1920) played a critical role in importing credit unions from Canada into the United States. He worked as a journalist early in his career, but it was while working as a stenographer in Canada's House of Commons (a position he held from 1892 to 1917) that he first began hearing about the problem of usury, which he then spent three years carefully researching while corresponding with founders of financial cooperatives and credit movements in Europe.
On Dec. 6, 1900, Desjardins and his wife, Dorimène, co-founded the first credit union in North America, Caisse d'épargne Desjardins, in Lévis, Quebec. Today, Desjardins Group CUs share many common backoffice functions, including IT.
According to Desjardins, the organization he founded drew upon the best of four European models: the caissse d'epargne from France, the Schulze-Delitzsh and Raiffeisen banks of Germany, and the Luzzatti bank of Italy. Between 1900 and 1906, Desjardins founded three other caisses populaires, but was unable to get federal legislation that would have created a Canada-wide framework for additional financial cooperatives.
In November of 1908, Desjardins arrived in Manchester, N.H.. at the invitation of a parish priest and explained the cooperative credit concept to parishioners who voted overwhelmingly in favor of forming what would become the first credit union in the United States, today known as St. Mary's Bank.
