Leading the Place-Based Economics Movement
Table of contents
Zita Cobb
This story is part of the Architects of Impact series, highlighting stories of innovation that demonstrate how our Community is mobilizing to ensure a world that works for all people and the planet.
On a rocky island as old as time, a small fishing community has survived an existential threat. Canada’s Fogo Island was settled centuries ago by immigrants from across the Atlantic Ocean following their own “gold rush”—cod fishing.
But when the local fishing industry collapsed in the 20th century, the Fogo Island legacy began to fade away before residents’ eyes.
Zita Cobb was a child at the time, the eighth generation to live on the island. When her father came home one day with just a single fish, the family’s fate—and eventually the island’s—changed forever.
If you look her up, you’ll see Zita was one of the leading technology executives in North America. With her father’s encouragement, she went from a fisherman’s daughter to a successful entrepreneur and leader by the time she was in her 40s.
Zita followed her father’s words: “Go and figure out this money thing before it eats everything we love,” she recounts him saying. Their community on Fogo Island was built on a barter system, and her family never used Canadian money until they moved to OntarioOttawa when Zita was still in school. Zita studied business, and later worked at oil and technology companies, helping them expand astronomically.
An entrepreneur by trade but a deeply rooted community member at heart, Zita ultimately returned to her hometown to start the social enterprise Shorefast and open the Fogo Island Inn, a luxury hotel that has transformed the fishing village into a thriving community for residents and visitors alike.
“Young folk they don’t stay / With the fisherman’s way”
Even before the Fogo Island Inn came to be, Zita had already begun reinvesting in her home.
She and her brothers had created a scholarship program for Fogo Island students to attend university. But when a mother asked them why they were incentivizing children to leave the island, Zita realized that the future was not just about Fogo Island youth, but an opportunity for the community and the island itself. “Why not set up something to help make work?” she says.
Zita explains her theory of community development with the metaphor of a cauliflower. Each community is a floret, connected by many levels of branches, all leading to a central stem. Fogo Island, she says, is a floret. With technology and resources as the stem, she says that opportunity can flow to each community, “creating the enabling conditions so people can innovate.”
Unfortunately, with the rise of globalism, Zita says that we have cut off the stem. People do not have the same connection to place as they used to, and that is eroding culture and common values. With limited economic mobility and a fading sense of place, communities like Fogo Island are suffering as people flock to bigger markets in search of opportunity.
The Fogo Island Inn is built on the concept of a “circular economy,” a system based on reuse, regeneration, and sustainability for the environment and the community. In consultation with her neighbors, who Zita says are resourceful and solutions-oriented people, they developed a model that not only includes locals in the business model but also invests sustainably in the community.
Through Shorefast, she launched the Shorefast Institute for Place-Based Economies, a community-based nonprofit that owns the Inn. This way, she can play a role in Fogo Island’s developing place-based economy while knowing that the future lies not in her hands, but in the community.
Each element of the Inn, like the farm-to-table food, the quilts on the beds, and the furniture in the rooms, comes from a local entrepreneur. And microgrants, funded by the Shorefast Institute, help incubate and grow these businesses.
The Inn’s profits support Fogo Island as it adapts to the modern economy that had threatened to leave it behind. Zita says, “We can do cultural, social, and local development at the same time as investments.” She urges investors not to shy away from place-based projects, and to invest in optimizing systems for the people in addition to the profit. “Bringing ‘place’ into systems makes them stronger,” she says.
Never Forget Your Sense of Place
Zita has a vision for Canada. With such a vast geography and even more diverse landscape of communities, she believes no one should be left behind. Nearly 5,000 other incorporated communities in Canada could one day disappear without sustainable economic investment. The Fogo Island model, which takes into account nature, culture, history, and values, can be applied across the country. “We can build a country where all investment is community development,” she says.
When place is at the center of investment, Zita says, “Money making and meaning making are not opposites.” Community development can make the economy stronger while preserving what Zita loves most—places.
Zita lives on Fogo Island in the house her uncle left to her. Families are fishing again in the harbor outside her window. People are coming from far away to enjoy the island’s rugged beauty.
While cauliflower may not grow in the 400-million-year-old rocks, there certainly is one thriving—Fogo Island itself. Zita’s vision has enabled this far-flung community to regrow its stem, ensuring its future and the shared prosperity of its people.
