“Leaders are the deepest believers”
In November 2023, Zita Cobb, CEO & Founder of Shorefast and Innkeeper of Fogo Island Inn, took centre stage to deliver the prestigious Thomas d’Aquino Lecture on Leadership. This two-part lecture series was hosted at the iconic National Art Gallery of Canada and the Ivey Business School in London, Ontario.
The following is an excerpt of her speech with a focus on growing the capacity of place leadership.
Born and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada, Hickey is a long-standing friend of Shorefast. Alongside her work with Fogo Island Arts, Hickey’s new role will encompass oversight of Shorefast’s robust arts program and environmental stewardship initiatives, as well as heritage sites and programs designed to center place, culture, and community.
Fogo Island Arts was established in 2008 with the belief that art and artists are visionaries that continue to bring new perspectives to the urgent issues of our time. The prestigious exhibition and residency program has welcomed a wide range of international artists, curators, and thinkers including Abbas Akhavan, Liam Gillick, Candice Hopkins, Brian Jungen, Kablusiak, Janice Kerbel, Sharon Lockhart, Ken Lum, Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa, Silke Otto-Knapp, and Jeremy Shaw, among many others.
Hickey joins Shorefast from The Shed in New York, the multidisciplinary arts centre where she led the visual arts program. Previously, she was a global Senior Director and Curator at Pace Gallery, where she established a new curatorial team and initiated the live arts program, Pace Live. During her tenure she curated numerous exhibitions such as monographic surveys of Jo Baer, Wifredo Lam, and Agnes Martin, alongside major thematic exhibitions.
Hickey says, “Fogo Island is an incredibly special place, geographically, culturally, and artistically. I am inspired by Shorefast and Fogo Island as an example of community resilience that is both holding on and reaching out to center new forms of cultural exchange, environmental sustainability, and economic development. The possibility of a shared dialogue across cultures, generations, and places is a vital part of forging a new vision for the future of our planet. The ability to offer time and space for artists, curators, writers, scientists, and other practitioners to create and connect is needed now more than ever. It is a great privilege to return to eastern Canada to begin this unique position, and I look forward to meaningful collaboration with artists, communities and colleagues on Fogo Island, and beyond.”
Zita Cobb, Co-founder of Shorefast, said: “Andria brings broad experience in program leadership and strategic planning to Fogo Island, as well as an esteemed curatorial career focused on global contemporary art. Her commitment to moving culture in new directions is deeply valuable to Shorefast’s work in community economic development.”
“Place holds all the answers.”
– Zita Cobb, Shorefast CEO & Founder
In mid-October Zita Cobb, Shorefast’s CEO & Founder, delivered the keynote address at the annual Evergreen Conference. Held at the Evergreen Brickworks in Toronto, the conference brings together thought leaders, community members, private and public sector innovators, and city builders from across the country who value place as key to a resilient and connected future.
At Shorefast, we believe that place holds all our relationships. When we practice economic development that takes into consideration the context of where we live – the geographic and human assets in each place – we set ourselves up for a stronger economic foundation that can successfully modulate the ecological, economic, and social needs of a community.
During her keynote, Zita reminded the crowd that “the opportunity for Canada is to figure out how we work at many scales.” Taking the local as our starting point, Shorefast’s work is to demonstrate how the proper tools and resources can enable other entrepreneurial communities to drive economic momentum and build toward the future they want.
Our national economy is strongest when it works toward the whole. Finding ways to stitch local economies into the national framework is central to what we do.
A fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, Peter Croal has been working in the field of environmental assessment and international development for over 35 years; his career has taken him to over 40 countries and he sits on the boards of several not-for-profit development organizations. This summer was Peter’s fourth year as a Geologist-in-residence with Shorefast.
The following is a condensed version of a conversation with Peter Croal.
When I take people on hikes around Fogo Island and Change Islands, I always start by saying, we come from the rocks and planetary processes. We wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for the minerals and elements that make up rocks and enter our food chain.
Life started three and a half billion years ago and the landforms we see today are all the result of plate tectonics, glacier movements and other earth systems. Moraines, lakes and rivers, ocean currents, fjords, sand deposits – these things form the basis of many of our cities and harbours and many of our industries. How the landscape is shaped and formed determines how our human civilization came to be; that’s all related to the rock cycle and planetary processes. And it is not a static system. The earth is constantly changing and re-inventing itself.
If we understand that we are part of a larger system called life – if we understand how it works – perhaps we can show more respect to those systems and protect and nourish them. The Grand Banks, which is home to historically one of the greatest fisheries, well, that was created by glacial and oceanic process.
Well, it is education but also inspiration and stimulation. What the visiting geologists try to do is not just talk about rocks (eg – this is granite; this is sandstone). Rather: what is our relationship to these rocks? What does it mean when you see a volcanic rock? We see them as clues to an evolving and exciting story.
We take the story that the landscape is telling us and translate it for other people to enjoy. If you don’t study geology, you are basically walking on top of a book that you can’t read. We want you to read that story. We want you to see the connections to everyday life through the rocks and landforms that are under our feet.
Fogo Island is one of the few places where you can walk across a magma chamber and at the same time see volcanic and sedimentary rocks in such proximity. Because the rocks are so well exposed, you can experience geological features that are hard to find in other places of the world. That brings people to a place. With Shorefast’s growing community science program, there are more opportunities to position Fogo Island as a hotbed for scientific research and expand career paths and opportunity in this place.
On a more informal level, a lot of people come to meet the geologists-in-residence during hosted office hours who don’t know anything about geology but say “I just love rocks.” This is a place that sparks fascination and has a story to tell.
Just by nature of being outside and engaging with the world you touch all kinds of different disciplines. Two of the collaborative events that I co-hosted with art-based practitioners (one of whom was Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, an artist and contributor to Fogo Island Arts’ “Meltwater” exhibition) were focused on marine health, rising water levels, and climate change. Ocean health is changing because of climate change and industrialization. Oceans are becoming more acidic and certain currents are starting to change. All of this affects the fishery, which is of course relevant to Fogo Island and Change Islands.
When two people with different backgrounds lead an event there’s an opportunity to speak about your discipline in a new way. Climate change is real, and shorelines are going to change. Having Alexa and me working together brings an arts-based audience and a science-based audience together and it forces us to think about things differently, exchange new ideas and ultimately understand what is at stake from a new perspective.
How do you get people to care about their natural environment and see themselves as a part of it?
You have to tell a story. Facts, science, and fear don’t necessarily work that well. You have to find where people are at and build a story around their understanding of how the world works. And you need to explore what interests people through their own experiences. Instead of throwing science at people, start with: here you are standing on a rock. What does it mean to you as a person and what is your relationship to this planet? What is the story that this rock or landform is telling you that can affect your life?
In a 5-minute conversation I try to get across that you are here because of a 3.5-billion-year experiment. Ninety-five percent of all life that has existed on the planet has come and is now extinct. You are seeing the remaining 5% that has made it through. To survive you must be adaptable and resilient. And right now, we are not very adaptable or resilient as a species. We still want to party as if there is an infinite supply of oxygen, soil, and fresh water. And there isn’t. Earth’s life supporting systems are sending us messages every day through increased fires, floods, storms, biodiversity loss and disease.
Shorefast’s sustainability efforts, the amazing rocks of Fogo and Change Islands, and the Fogo Island Inn are natural drawing points for people. Many of the people who come to the Inn and to Fogo Island are interested in having these conversations especially after the experience of being exposed to an economic development model that is trying to live more harmoniously with people and place. I meet a lot of people who are taking what’s happening here in the arts, environment, and the economy back home to their communities. Shorefast and Fogo Island are catalysts and crucibles for generating and exchanging dynamic ideas around sustainability. The hope is that those ideas continue to spread elsewhere.
On Fogo Island our geographic context is strongly informed by the Labrador Current.
Positioned in the pathway of this current, our island has developed a culture and way of life (from the foods we eat to the livelihoods we’ve sustained to the traditions we love) that is deeply rooted in our relationship to the waters around us.
As with any relationship there are both challenges and benefits. The strong winds and colder temperatures that move across our landscape result in a shorter outdoor growing season; this can be contrasted with the abundance of marine life that the current supports – the primary reason people have settled here for centuries.
Whether you live in the direct pathway of the Labrador Current or not, its influence is significant to our global health.
Considered a distinct ecosystem, the Labrador Current helps keep the world’s oceans alive. Cold winter temperatures in the Labrador Sea are responsible for pushing oxygen-rich surface waters to depths far below the ocean’s top layer where they are dispersed by deep boundary currents. These oxygenated waters work in similar ways to our bloodstream – feeding oxygen-rich waters to the Arctic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans – giving context to the Labrador Current’s moniker as “a lung of the ocean.”
Crucially, this oxygen stream supports marine life around the world, that in turn supports human life. On Fogo Island, it enables our traditional and primary livelihood: the fishery.
As more revelations are made about the importance of this cold current and its influence on other oceans globally, our waters have become a significant area of research. Scientists are especially keen to understand how climate change is altering the current both through an increase in temperature and wind change. At the local level – community members and fishers are keen to know what warming waters will mean for the fishery as more species begin to migrate.
One pillar of our Environmental Stewardship work on Fogo Island has us partnering with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Marine Institute at Memorial University to support academic research geared around tracking changes in our local waters. A key initiative to support this goal is Community Science – a collaborative community-based approach to building up scientific knowledge by employing trained community members who can bring their background lived experience (cultural, industrial, environmental) to each project. In rural and remote locations, where it is not always easy to bring in scientists for study, community members are bridging the gap.
Recent projects on Fogo Island in partnership with community members and academic partners include ice tracking and species monitoring; both of which contribute to our understanding of changes in our local waters year-over-year.
“We thought we were one of the four corners of the world; turns out we are at the centre.”
Each year, during the onset of summer, Fogo Islanders bear witness to a changing climate through an experience of “Iceberg Alley.” The parade of icebergs that make their way down from glaciers situated along the coast of Greenland – via the Labrador Current – are a seasonal event; in recent years, however, it is clear to residents that there are significant fluctuations afoot. These fluctuations include increased glacial melt and a prolonged or sometimes negligible iceberg season.
This year for example, the season stretched from February (very early) to July (starting to get late). An increase in glacial flow has an impact on everything from the duration of our fishing season to rising water levels along our coast.
While Fogo Island’s location at the edge of the North Atlantic Ocean has often earned it a reputation as remote, faraway – and a tongue in cheek title as ‘one of the four corners of the world’ – it is increasingly clear that coastal communities like Fogo Island are at the centre of the climate crisis, rather than off to the side.
It will be coastal communities like Fogo Island that continue to experience an outsized impact and be extremely vulnerable to the changes in climate that we are all observing globally. To raise awareness both locally and internationally, Shorefast launched an artwork by artist Liam Gillick in October 2022, known colloquially as The Fogo Island Red Weather Station. The station is both a scientific tool to collect data and an artwork that seeks to communicate the value of life and knowledge in this place.
The climate crisis can’t be confronted or resolved by any one community; it will take all of us working at different scales to begin to develop a unified way forward.
On Fogo Island we have been building the case for an Environmental Stewardship program that is multi-pronged in approach, reaches across disciplines, supports the culture of people whose lives and livelihoods are linked to the sea, and can be scaled to create connection and collaboration across many sectors, with a focus on replicability across Newfoundland and Atlantic Canada.
The Labrador Current is part of our life on Fogo Island; it’s significant to yours as well.
Read more about our Environmental Stewardship work.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
You can experience it here or Far Away From Far Away (nfb.ca)
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.