Engaging community members in ocean research means they bring their historical, cultural, industrial, and lived experience to each project.
Walter Penton (second from left) applying new research skills on Fogo Island
Like most Fogo Islanders, Walter Penton has a deep appreciation and understanding of our surrounding waters. “At the edge of the northeast coast of the Atlantic Ocean it often feels like our waters are limitless,” Penton says, “but there’s a lot more going on below the surface – considering our geographic location, our tides, our cold currents.”
A recently retired transportation worker, Penton is now utilizing his experience and curiosity about the natural environment on Fogo Island to participate in critical monitoring projects on our island that are helping bridge gaps in research. Commonly referred to as Community Science, it’s a growing area of focus for Shorefast that is supported through our partnerships with The Department of Fisheries and Oceans and The Marine Institute at Memorial University.
“Community members with lived experiences in nature can assist in data collection and provide researchers with the information they need. It’s a powerful way to scale up efforts in conservation and coastal adaptation,” Amanda Lim, Shorefast’s Program Manger, Environmental Initiatives, says.
Owing to our geographic location within the Labrador Current (often referred to as a “lung of the ocean”) Fogo Island’s waters are one of the few places where oxygen from the air is transferred to the deepest parts of the ocean with the help of this extremely cold current. This process is critical to keeping marine life alive and influences other oceans around the globe. As such, Fogo Island is a significant bellwether for the changes we are seeing in our climate.
Fogo Island and Change Islands community members partaking in a training initiative in Terra Nova National Park
Last spring, Penton joined a group of Fogo Island and Change Islands community members in Terra Nova, the easternmost national park in Canada, where Shorefast and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans were offering a training initiative that would support further research projects on Fogo Island. Back home, Penton and others were able to share what they learned and initiate a new monitoring project around juvenile species in eel grass habitats—an important indicator of our ocean’s current health.
“The training this past year was great,” Penton says. “It opened my eyes to our interactions with marine life, and I am eager to learn more.” Initiatives like these have the potential to establish Fogo Island as a key player in marine research, opening the door for supplementary income and career opportunities that weren’t previously available.
“From what I have seen so far, the future for Fogo Island is very bright. With the insight of Shorefast and its partners, we can be a role model for the province.”
Hospitality is central to everything we do at Shorefast. We believe that every business that serves humans should be built around hospitality: the practice of relationship building and relationship making.
Guest Experience Director, Sandra Cull & Community Host, Rosemarie Burke (left to right) at the Inn. Photo credit: Valerie Howes.
Fogo Island Inn was built to showcase the culture and nature of Fogo Island and add another leg to the economy by complementing the primary and traditional fishing industry. Since opening its doors in 2013, the Inn has become a world leader in the practice of regenerative, community-based travel, and is inspiring other industry leaders to adopt practices that benefit both people and place.
Initiated through Fogo Island Inn, the Community Host program pairs visitors to the island with community members who are incredibly knowledgeable about the island’s history, culture, and geography. Through informal island orientations, community members bring Fogo Island to life though their own lived experience and offer visitors a nuanced perspective of daily life.
Recently, we chatted with Rosemarie Burke, a Community Host who hails from the community of Tilting on Fogo Island, about her experience as a host and her reflections on Fogo Island Inn’s first decade of community business. The conversation has been edited to reflect highlights of our conversation.
Becoming a Community Host
When Rosemarie first heard that the Inn was being built, she was 56. “I’ve got to be a part of that,” she recalls thinking. After three years as the Head of Housekeeping she moved into the Community Host Coordinator role, one that she loved, but ultimately led her to see that a role as a Community Host would suit her best.
“The thing I didn’t realize about the community host role until I started was that I’ve been doing community hosting my whole life,” Rosemarie adds. “I’m an avid outdoors person, always walking and hiking, and whenever I see someone coming toward me that I don’t know, I introduce myself and ask them where they are from; I’ll point out certain landmarks, such as the best spot to look out on the Atlantic ocean, or where to find Eider ducks nesting, and a conversation is started.”
“I always want to welcome people; to let them know that they’d be offered help if they needed it; to invite them back for a cup of tea.”
Managing Director of Fogo Island Inn, Amanda Decker-Penton & Rosemarie during the construction of Fogo Island Inn. Photo credit: Paddy Barry.
Creating the opportunity for exchange & connection
“Now, before I go to work in the morning, I’m wondering and excited about who I am going to meet today and where they will be from. Will they welcome me as I welcome them?”
When people first learned about the creation of the Inn there was some worry, Rosemarie explains. “We have had very little change since the first settlers arrived. We didn’t know what this was going to mean. When the Inn opened Zita wrote a personal invite to everyone on the island to ask them to stay at the Inn for a night and experience what was being offered to guests. It made a difference.”
“This Inn has brought new life to this place,” Rosemarie adds. “The community feels represented through this program. Guests come here knowing some things about the island but after a trip with a community host, they feel at home. They feel that they understand where they are.”
That sense of understanding goes both ways. For Rosemarie, working with visitors has revealed her own island to her in a new way.
“Now I have a greater appreciation for some of the things I ignored before I met guests. I just see the beauty of it all. Guests come into the Inn and see the Atlantic Ocean and say “wow.” That’s their first word. And you know, now I do too. I think to myself, How lucky am I to be living in a place like this. Now, I take more moments to stop and recognize the beauty around me.”
In 2022 – Fogo Island Inn’s Community Hosts spent a combined 9,232 hours providing in-person, community-based island orientations and experiences for visitors to our island. Read more about our community-centric approach to economic development in our latest Impact Report.
Small-scale exchanges can have a big impact
“The Inn is changing the perception people have of small and rural communities,” Rosemarie says. “Not many people knew about Fogo Island before the Inn. Now there are more artists coming here. They are seeing the beauty and painting the beauty. Everything we look at daily – the architecture, the fishing stages, the flakes – artists are painting them, and people are coming to see them.”
While Fogo Island has always had a strong local artisan culture, increasing the opportunity for the cross-pollination of ideas, art, and experiences between people with different backgrounds is a vital way to strengthen our social fabric at a local level and at a national level. It brings renewed attention to the value of places big and small across our country and reminds us of our common humanity.
“People who live in cities are coming now to enjoy the quiet and freedom of Fogo Island. We have a close proximity to nature. You can feel the ocean. I am sure that lots of little communities across Canada have the same beauty as Fogo Island. Small communities have so much to offer.”
A cultural asset: Newfoundlander’s sense of hospitality
“We live on an island. We know just about everybody here. And when people come to the island you are going to welcome them. Historically, this was a tough place to eke out a living – coming together is important.”
“Fogo Islanders love a stranger. And when a stranger gets to know us, they love us too.”
In 2015, Fogo Island Inn was awarded the Community Engagement award by PURE, a leading experiential travel show. In this 2-minute clip Zita Cobb, Shorefast’s Founder & CEO, reminds us why community connection is so important to our understanding of travel.
— Wendell Berry, American Farmer, Writer, Philosopher.
Photo credit: Paddy Barry
Food is so much more than sustenance. What we eat, grow, forage, and fish tells us about the culture, environment, and history of a place. Understanding and celebrating our local foodways is another avenue to build stronger relationships between people and place and reinforce the importance of local growing and sourcing to our economy.
Our newly launched Foodways Program on Fogo Island is designed to unite and build on the many food-related initiatives that have animated our work over the years with the goal of creating a more sustainable food system on Fogo Island that can be a contagious example for other rural and remote communities.
The following is a sampling of some of the past, current, and ongoing initiatives that Shorefast has pursued to support a deeper connection to place through food:
Shorefast and Foodways
Fogo Island Inn
Ten years ago, Shorefast opened Fogo Island Inn with the intention to activate the cultural heritage and natural assets of the place, including our local foodways. From the Inn’s kitchen, we brought forward contemporary ways of using local ingredients, broadened what can be grown on the island, and increased the focus on local sourcing to support the creation of a widening food entrepreneur landscape on Fogo Island.
One such example of a new-to-the-island vegetable is fennel. Having asked local growers to cultivate fennel, initially for use in dishes at the Inn, we see its use within our new restaurant–The Storehouse—as an important gateway to sharing ways to cook with this vegetable, as well as other nutrient-rich ingredients that can be found on Fogo Island.
Photo credit: Andrea O’Brian
Fogo Island Fish
After opening the Inn, we also turned our thinking to our primary industry, the fishery, and partnered with the Fogo Island Co-operative Society, which operates three seafood processing plants on the island, to start a micro-enterprise called Fogo Island Fish, designed to develop markets for high quality hand-lined Cod. The practice of handlining involves no by-catch, and while it is labour intensive, we pay fishers double the market rate for cod caught by gill-nets. Fogo Island Fish currently sells wholesale to several fine-dining restaurants across Canada.
Seaweed Cultivation
In 2021, Shorefast launched an R&D pilot in collaboration with the Fogo Island Co-Operative Society to explore the commercial viability of seaweed farming. As a sustainable, plant based nutritional food that has significant environmental benefits and economic potential, seaweed cultivation could help diversify our island’s economy, with implications for replicability throughout Atlantic Canada.
Foraging
Historically, foraging for wild berries allowed Fogo Islanders to survive in this sub-arctic landscape. People foraged and ate partridgeberries, blueberries, marshberries, and bakeapples. The two dozen or so other berries were, not so long ago, collectively called ‘poison berries’ as a precaution from parents to children. Of course, we now understand a lot more about the berry species we share our landscape with, and that knowledge is often enriched by visiting experts invited by Shorefast who share even more. One such expert was able to expand our understanding not only of the other (not poison but very edible!) berries but also some of the mushrooms and herbs that were never previously understood as food.
Photo credit: Joe Ip
Medicinal Benefits
The arrival of Dr. John Weber, a Shorefast academic in-residence and a professor at Memorial University, fondly known as the “Berry Man,” helped us understand that blueberry leaves contain even more antioxidants than the noble berry itself. As we spend more time understanding the rich bounty in front of us, we are re-discovering valuable knowledge.
Wildflowers
In 2010, Shorefast commissioned Todd Boland of the Botanical Gardens in St. Johns, NL, to produce a Fogo Island wildflower guide book. The goal was to highlight the wide range of plant life on the island with a particular focus on edibles and traditional uses. This important work laid the foundation to better understand the land under our feet – land that Captain Wadham famously said Newfoundlanders, with their over-focus on the sea, had for too long regarded as a “conveniently-anchored ship.”
Food Circles
Adapted from the notion of sharing built into our traditional song circles, Shorefast has been bringing people together to share place-specific growing and cooking learnings and stories. Past panelists include Mitchell Davis, James Beard Foundation, and Lori McCarthy, a long-time Shorefast partner and Newfoundland & Labrador foodways expert.
Food Circle at Big Space Mitchell Davis, James Beard Foundation, hosts a food circle on Fogo Island
Recently, Shorefast’s founder & CEO, Zita Cobb, joined Michael Bungay Stanier on his podcast MBS Works to read two pages from one of her favourite books—The Third Pillar —and talk about the importance of community, economic dignity, and finding the right people to help create real change.
Recently, Shorefast’s founder & CEO, Zita Cobb, joined Michael Bungay Stanier on his podcast MBS Works to read two pages from one of her favourite books—The Third Pillar —and talk about the importance of community, economic dignity, and finding the right people to help create real change.
Written by Raghuram Rajan, The Third Pillar, was foundational to the creation of Shorefast’s first national initiative – a Community Economies Pilot that focused on discovering the key levers and interventions to strengthen local economies.
“If we can put community at the centre of the economy, there’s a seat for everyone to be there.” -Zita Cobb
Zita Cobb was born on Fogo Island in 1958, part of the eighth generation in her family to call the island home. Forced to leave after the collapse of the inshore cod fishery, she and her family ended up in Ontario, Canada where she studied business in Ottawa. Following a subsequent successful career in high-tech, Zita returned to Fogo Island and established Shorefast in 2004 with two of her siblings, Alan and Anthony Cobb.
The story of her early life inspired the National Film Board of Canada’s immersive, interactive film in 2021 called Far Away from Far Away.
Far Away From Far Away marks the next phase in the National Film Board of Canada’s continuing relationship with the people of Fogo Island.
More than 50 years ago, a film crew led by Colin Low headed to the island to shoot a series of short videos and films as part of a larger project known as Challenge for Change.
Fogo island is a small floret with big stories. Here, we share these stories to present varying views on life, work, and art on this island of the North Atlantic. But first, why a cauliflower?
Why a cauliflower? Shorefast Founder Zita Cobb first encountered a cauliflower after moving away from Fogo Island and it was just about the most exotic food she’d ever seen. Its structure fascinated her and it eventually became a symbol for Shorefast’s community economies theory.
The noble cauliflower is a fractal and its differently-sized florets make up a repeating pattern of beautiful clusters: some big, some small. The stem of the cauliflower directs nutrients to the individual florets.
At Shorefast, we think about the planet and its individual places as a cauliflower. Communities are the florets, with small places like Fogo Island comprising the little florets, and big places like New York City comprising the larger ones. The stem of the cauliflower is representative of our economic systems, which, when they work as they should, hold us all together and channel nourishment to the florets to keep them thriving. When that stem becomes too self-serving, or prioritizes bigger florets over the little ones, the florets begin to suffer.
Small places have been disappearing – in other words, small florets have been withering. When we practice business in a way that serves community and place, we ensure that the stem services the whole of the cauliflower.
The stories told here remind us to think and act holistically and to consider the diverse lifestyles, viewpoints and experiences as making up the whole of our human experience.
In late February, Zita Cobb, Shorefast’s CEO & Founder, delivered the keynote address at the 2023 Sorenson Impact Summit.
A platform for transformative change, the Summit encouraged speakers to consider how the impact investing community can supercharge innovative solutions for the world’s most pressing problems. Over the course of 4 days, top changemakers discussed how we can transform our economy to create a more just, equitable, sustainable, and prosperous future for all.
Zita was able to share her unique point of view, and elaborate on Shorefast’s proof of concept developed on Fogo Island, as a way to prompt people to rethink how our economic systems can be rebuilt to be in service of place.
“Asset-based community development is essential to every place. Humans often have a very shallow understanding of what economic development is and what our assets are. That has given rise to a world where people make investments, but they are not development. Development is about uplifting the inherent assets of a place.”
-Zita Cobb
Prior to speaking at the Summit, Zita answered questions on why “Place” is our most important economic gift.
Over the summer, Shorefast held a community and information consultation at the Lion’s Club in the community of Fogo to present on the progress of our Seaweed Pilot. The meeting, one of several held over the course of the Pilot, marked a year of exploration into the commercial viability of seaweed farming on Fogo Island.
The Pilot, led by Shorefast and in partnership with Fogo Island Cooperative Society Ltd and local fishers, along with the support of our funding partners Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation and the Marine Institute at Memorial University, involves understanding whether seaweed can grow reliably in different areas around Fogo Island with the ability to produce enough harvest to make it practical to pursue as a new market diversification product. Nascent business exploration has indicated that small-scale production of seaweed products would fit well with the high-value and niche market that seaweed draws. If seaweed cultivation is successful, the Pilot has the potential to be a scalable diversification opportunity for many parts of Atlantic Canada.
Shorefast’s environmental stewardship coordinator is featured on CBC’s The Broadcast talking about the potential for seaweed cultivation on Fogo Island
An important part of Shorefast’s work under the banner of Environmental Stewardship is to find new ways to create economic opportunity for our community while relying on the inherent knowledge and geographic assets already in place. Crucially, seaweed is a sustainable, plant-based nutritional food that has economic and environmental benefits: growing seaweed is environmentally regenerative and adds to the health of the marine ecosystem, while also capturing carbon. Most published literature suggests that aquaculture – including seaweed – enhances lobster stocks in the vicinity, a relationship that dovetails well with our community’s strong fishing economy.
At the meeting in August our environmental stewardship coordinator and other community engagement facilitators fielded questions and feedback about the next steps of the project with many community members showing interest in getting involved with the initiative. The group, as well as Shorefast and its partners, is enthused by the notion of Fogo Island becoming a pioneer in seaweed cultivation along the North Atlantic coast.
In the current phase of the project, seaweed test plots have been mapped around the island and we are preparing to deploy test lines that will be regularly monitored. Recent results look promising and if all goes well, we anticipate being able to harvest the seaweed in the summer of 2023; at this point we will have a greater understanding of the opportunity going forward.
As part of our efforts to build a market, Fogo Island Inn’s kitchen has been experimenting with potential food products that could result from a seaweed harvest. Two recent small-batch products, which can be found on display at the Orange Lodge on Fogo Island, include Black Kelp Mustard and Sea Buckthorn Sauce. Tim Charles, Executive Chef of the Fogo Island Inn, says the condiments can be paired with anything, but, of course, he highly recommends them with cod!
Initiated in 2004 as one of Shorefast’s inaugural programs, the Fogo Island Annual Scholarship provides financial support for all eligible Fogo Island Central Academy graduates who are pursuing any form of post-secondary education or training (a portion of funds raised are sent to A.R Scammell school on Change Islands proportional to student population). The Scholarship program is funded through the generosity of local community members, local businesses, and donors who span Canada more broadly. All funds raised are divided evenly among applicants.
There is no formal application process for the scholarship. Instead, to receive their scholarship grant funds, we simply ask the students to provide us their thoughts on issues relevant to our community by composing a short, opinion-based essay, recording a video response, or creating an art piece. It’s a key way we receive feedback from our youth, and it’s a yearly highlight for us to read and experience their thoughts and ideas.
This year graduates were asked to respond to any one of these four questions:
What can we learn from the resiliency Fogo Islanders have shown in the past (such as facing the cod moratorium and resisting resettlement) and how can that help us during times of uncertainty in the present (such as the pandemic and climate change)?
What actions can Fogo Islanders take to create an inclusive community where everyone can be their authentic selves?
Reflect on what it means to be a Fogo Islander. How can we preserve who we are as we continue to open up to the world?
Envision the main street of your community on Fogo Island in the year 2050. What does it look like? How is it different than it is in 2022, and why are those changes important?
With input from the graduates, we mounted an exhibition of their essays and art pieces at the Punt Premises, and we invited the students, their families, and their friends to an opening celebration. It was a great way to share the students’ ideas with the wider community and applaud their accomplishments.
Quotations from essays are displayed alongside art pieces throughout the outbuildings of the Premises, and the community was invited to come down and read what our young people have to say.
Congratulations to all our graduates. We can’t wait to see where your studies and life experiences take you!
We’re very grateful to the many other businesses and individuals that contribute funds and prizes to the scholarship which allow us to grow the pool of grant money available to our students. The scholarship is a true community effort. To learn more about how you can contribute to the Fogo Island Annual Scholarship program please contactdonations@shorefast.org
Titled, A Variability Quantifier, 2022, and known colloquially as The Fogo Island Red Weather Station, Gillick’s artwork forms part of a larger collaborative project that unites 28 art organizations around the world through the World Weather Network (WWN). The constellation of geographically-diverse ‘weather stations’ are responding to the climate crisis through the eyes of artists, writers, and communities by sharing observations, stories, reflections and images about their local weather, creating an archipelago of voices and viewpoints. Spanning Nigeria to Iceland to New York, the coalition is bringing increased attention to the importance of artists and writers to the dialogue around climate change.
Listen to Liam Gillick on CBC’s the Q talking about art, Fogo Island, and a weather station to the global climate crisis
Designed with advice from the Fogo Island community, Gillick’s weather station takes its structural cues from traditional outport fishing stages found throughout Newfoundland and Labrador. The structure is a framework for scientists and local community members to add meteorological instruments to measure and track local weather and monitor changes connected to an increasing experience of the climate crisis, including changes to the annual passage of icebergs in ‘Iceberg Alley.’ The station will serve as a location for community gathering, creative place-making, education and discussion, as well as a functional weather station.
For Gillick, The Fogo Island Red Weather Station is a continuation of his interest in understanding the origins of climate science and his long-standing appreciation of Fogo Island as a compelling geographic location. For Fogo Islanders, who have a distinct and embodied relationship with weather, this artwork is a reminder of the significant imprint weather has made on the cultural and physical landscape of Fogo Island and the influence it will continue to exert on our evolving modern outport.
The artwork is being acquired by the National Gallery of Canada as part of its National Outreach Initiative in which artworks from the collection are sited and maintained at localities across the country. It will be displayed on the island through to October 2026.
Continue scrolling to read more about weather’s influence on Fogo Island and art’s role in a healthy economy.
Understanding Life in the Pathway of the Labrador Current
By selecting Fogo Island as one of the 28 locations that will host a weather station, the World Weather Network is considering the variety of climates and topographies that dynamically make up our world and each region’s insights into how weather changes will play a determining role in our shared futures. In many of these singular locations, weather is understood acutely by the communities that live there. This contrasts with more densely populated regions where people generally live in more stable climates and interact with the weather in a much more static sense: by checking the internet for updates.
On Fogo Island our relationship to our distinct environment can be viewed as both a challenge and a joy—the Labrador current is the bearer of moody weather shifts and a prolonged winter, and also the provider of the single greatest asset that continues to define our lives: the sea and its prolific marine life.
In contrast to the traditional four seasons, we count Seven Seasons that tie into the foundational basis of our fishing economy (it should be noted many Fogo Islanders make the case for even more seasons). A close understanding of the natural environment is necessary when your livelihood is dependent on it. Before the advances of larger fishing boats and weather data, fishers had to learn to read the weather like the back of their hand (and still do) as any trip out into the ocean posed significant risk.
Spring is when Icebergs arrive on the horizon
One of the most poignant examples of our first-hand knowledge as it relates to the human-caused changes we are seeing on Fogo Island is illustrated in ‘Iceberg Alley.’ Watching the glacial ice flow that passes by Fogo Island, carried by the swift Labrador Current, is a local pastime and an unofficial marker of the transition to summer. In recent years however, those majestic Icebergs have substantially increased in concentration and flow—a change that Fogo Islanders have experienced in real-time simply by bearing witness to the same stretch of ocean year over year. This kind of qualitative, knowledge-based data is crucial for understanding what is changing in our oceans. It is knowledge that reflects a lived experience of the weather.
Berry season on Fogo Island
What does art have to do with the weather?
Fogo Island Arts (FIA), Shorefast’s foundational program on Fogo Island, is underpinned by the conviction that individuals are shaped by place—that our knowledge, culture, and capacity to relate to one another depends on the specificity of our surroundings. Creating a healthy, vibrant community economy relies on integrating art and artists into dialogue and partnerships with diverse sectors of the community to broaden our understanding of what is possible.
The Fogo Island Red Weather Station is a reminder of our shared and embodied experience of weather that ties directly to our culture. This open-air exhibit will be a public space to facilitate community gathering and connection through conversations about the weather. For Gillick, this artwork is built around the relevance of intuitive knowledge to our conversations—big and small—that are necessary to address climate change in a meaningful way. A central theme throughout many of his climate-related projects is an interest in understanding “the history of the maths behind climate research, how and why things are measured as they are, and how different cultural traditions of tracking weather can add to our understanding of it.”
In the local context, the Weather Station represents a new era of weather data collection on Fogo Island. Owing to our remote location, Fogo Island currently relies on triangulated data from nearby weather stations to provide a ‘best guess’ on the day’s weather events. Quantitative data collection on Fogo Island will increase our capacity to participate in scientific research as commissioned by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Marine Institute at Memorial University, as well as complementing our community science initiatives, such as ice-tracking, lobster-monitoring, and capelin spawning that are being rolled out under Shorefast’s Environmental Stewardship program.
Knowing that coastal cities and communities are at the forefront of the climate crisis, we are a bellwether for changes being felt globally. Our local knowledge and intimate relationship with the natural environment is a key asset in our adaptive and responsive future.
By looking at the changes to our global weather through the lens of art we are invited to consider what is at stake for all of us.
