On a frigid February Friday, Trish Paton will sign paycheques at the Regina Community Clinic, drop in at Community Action Co-op and spend time with a reporter.
Her days are never the same, and she likes them that way.
Besides, she needs to be flexible to accommodate everything on her agenda.
Whether you consider her a consultant, an activist or a volunteer, the list of causes she embraces is long, and all the items on it are linked by one word – co-operation.
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“The notion of co-operation I think I like because it’s a bit of social conscience attached to a business sense,” she muses.
“The focus is more on doing business and being a profitable business and all of those things you would hear out of any corporate entity, but recognizing if the people buying and using your product weren’t there, you wouldn’t have much to do.”
Paton grew up on a farm near Bechard, Sask. It was a four-elevator town in those days and has now mostly disappeared.
She said her co-operative ideals likely came from her mother’s family, and from growing up in a place where it’s easier to gain perspective on what others are going through.
“There are fundamentally unfair things out there that just shouldn’t be.”
After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science in Alberta and Nova Scotia, Paton worked in the library at the University of Calgary for several years and spent summers on the farm.
In 1997 she tired of that and moved back to Saskatchewan permanently.
She worked at the Riceton, Sask., credit union for a year, spent three years as a policy analyst at Credit Union Central, and worked for the provincial government for a year.
Paton helps on the family grain farm as needed – gardening, yard work, painting and, in the fall, operating equipment, but she doesn’t see herself taking it on full-time without a reasonable, consistent income. Her brother tried farming five years ago but it didn’t work out. Their parents are renting out some land and scaling back.
Since April 2002, she has been working on her own, doing volunteer board work and accepting consulting contracts involving research and policy for co-ops.
Her academic focus was on international development, and several trips to Africa reinforced her ideas about the co-operative model.
“People over there have a much better sense of co-operatives and the social meaning and social roles that co-ops can play,” she said. “It’s like what the 1930s and 1940s were here.”
For example, farmers often couldn’t get financing unless they formed a credit union to provide those services for each other.
“You get the community together, you identify the gap in service and you fill it yourself.”
At the same time, co-ops can be independent, particularly in smaller places where they can operate entirely to meet specific needs.
Paton sees that in the co-ops she chooses to work with as a board member and consultant.
For example, the goal at Community Action Co-op Regina is to alleviate poverty, says general manager Kathleen Donauer.
Paton is working on two studies for the co-op, on low-income housing and transportation.
At the Regina Community Clinic, of which Paton is president, the membership has some control over the health care they receive.
There, the doctors are paid by salary, not fee-for-service. All services are under one roof, from optometry to massage therapy to counselling.
Do patients get better care?
“Because we provide the salary space, we’re not obliged to pump through as many people as we can,” she said. “If you don’t have the time to care about people, ultimately you’re not going to do as good a job caring for them.
“It’s a system that has to have spare time in it. You can’t think of it as wasted time or wasted money.”
But obtaining sustainable funding to accomplish those types of goals is a challenge for all service co-ops, she said.
Paton’s work extends to heading the Community Health Co-operative Federation Ltd., sitting on the board of the Saskatchewan Council for International Co-operation and working on the international program committee for the Canadian Co-operative Association.
Is she an activist?
Not the placard-waving kind, she said.
“If it means believing that there’s always improvements that can be made, yes, I’m an activist in that sense. I will contribute to making those improvements but I will contribute in my own fashion. I guess that’s from my farming background – I’ll be an activist but I’ll do it my own way.”
