Patricia Claire Taylor served the credit union movement for nearly thirty years and held a number of key credit union roles.
Patricia, known as Pat, was born in 1935 and grew up in Kensington, New South Wales. She attended Sydney Girls High School. She first became involved with the credit union movement in 1968, more by chance than planning.
Pat’s first credit union role was part-time, when she became the only employee of the Gilbarco Employees' Credit Union. Over the next five years this expanded to a staff of three people.
Later, in the 1970s, Pat worked with the NSW Credit Union League as a Field Officer and gained a reputation as a problem fixer. During the next five years she worked particularly in helping fix issues in credit unions which were struggling financially.
Pat was interviewed by Richard Raxworthy on 2 March 1994 (oral history tape held in our collection). In the interview she talked about her work and said
“Yes, well I started off as a Field Officer and then I think after a year or two the Stabilisation group was formed. I worked then with Geoff Cambridge in the stabilising of these credit unions that had funds injected into them to rehabilitate them through the Savings Protection Fund…I used to inspect them and make sure they were on the right track and look at their accounts and analyse the results that they were all going in the right direction. There would have been half a dozen to ten credit unions involved over a couple of years in that exercise. Eventually that became a fairly significant part of the League's operations. It expanded and had more and more people in it and I ultimately became the Manager of the Stabilisation Section.”
In the 1980s Pat was appointed as executive officer of the Premier Credit Union, which had 20,000 members that were employees of hospitals and paramedical professionals. Later she was appointed chief executive of United Credit Union in Western Australia, at a time when the organisation was in financial difficulty and a supervisory committee had been appointed. Pat stopped all commercial lending and got out of a number of operations in Victoria. The credit union was able to eventually trade its way out of difficulties.
Pat Taylor was recognised for her contribution to the credit union movement and she received an Award for Distinguished Services from CUSCAL in November 1996.
