Pat Conaty studied politics and economics at the University of California. He moved to the UK in 1978 and, from the mid-1980s, worked at the Birmingham Settlement, an inner-city project founded by social reformers in 1899. Originally a women’s residential project, it evolved to become an inner-city advice and support centre.
He worked there until the late 1990s, becoming development director. He helped set up local credit unions, the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association, and the Aston Reinvestment Trust (now ART), the first mutually owned community reinvestment fund in the UK, with Sir Adrian Cadbury as chair and Steve Walker, seconded from Barclays, as CEO.
From 1999 he worked as a researcher for New Economics Foundation, and in 2007, was made a fellow. He also researched for the Universities of Birmingham and Salford.
Pat kept up links with colleagues in North America, and in 2009, together with Mike Lewis, he co-wrote The Resilience Imperative, published by New Society Publishers. In it, they lay out the options for getting the economy back on track whilst making it more sustainable.
In 2011, Co-operatives UK commissioned him to research A Co-operative green economy – New solutions for energy and sustainable social justice as energy organisations were the fastest-growing area for co-operatives in the UK.
A few years later he was a founding director of the New Garden Cities Alliance, an advocacy group working to promote the garden city concept pioneered in Letchworth by Ebenezer Howard in 1903, and in 2016 he was a founding member of the Public Bank for Wales Action Group which evolved into the Banc Cambria project. They campaigned for a mutually owned high street bank to be part-owned by the Welsh Government. Sadly, 10 years later, despite promises of support from Welsh politicians, this is still a work in progress.
In 2017 Pat worked on a research programme with Alex Bird, Cilla Ross and Philip Ross (no relation) for the Co‑operative College which resulted in the publication Not Alone, followed by Working Together for Co-operatives UK. Both looked across Europe and the States for examples of how co-operatives support the self-employed. The TUC became interested and commissioned a handbook, Organising Precarious Workers.
In 2019 he was a founder member of union-coops:uk, the campaigning group working to get trade unions and worker co-ops to recognise their common aims and work together to develop fully unionised worker co-ops.
Pat is survived by his wife, Rosemary, daughter Elsa and son Jake.
