For Place-Based Economies

A national initiative to catalyse the holistic development of local economies, big and small.

A photo of Zita Cobb

Message from Zita Cobb

After 20 years of building an engine of economic development on Fogo Island, Shorefast has embarked on an ambitious mission to broaden the reach of our community economies work; to bring knowledge, tools, and networks to more people in more places. We’re converting our practice into knowledge that can be harnessed and deployed by other economic actors: enterprising communities, businesses, and governments.

The Shorefast Network for Place-Based Economies will build, learn, and share economic development practices that activate the assets of local places, enabling prosperous economies that serve people, nature, and culture.

Strong communities are natural ecosystems of innovation. By strengthening the capacities of communities to identify, harness, and amplify their specific assets, we can help enable economic agency and prosperity for places big and small.

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What is Holistic Economic Development?

Driven by data and leading with an entrepreneurial, integrated, cross-sectoral approach, holistic development leverages global pools of financial capital to create and sustain community-based economic momentum.

Collaborative

Integrates efforts across business, government, and community sectors in pursuit of resilience.

Place-specific

Roots development in local strengths by putting place at the centre of development approaches to harness, amplify, and activate local assets.

Future-Minded

 Seeks innovative outcomes that are sustainable, scalable, adaptive, and equitable.

What Will the Shorefast Network Include?

Digital platforms that facilitate practitioner networking, share curriculum, and host a library of resources.

Community economies business hub on Fogo Island that acts as a centre for Shorefast’s ongoing work and supports local entrepreneurs.

Tools to support local economies and community finance models.

Opportunities for practitioners to connect and convene (both physically and virtually), residences, research, and consulting services.

“That which is possible in practice is possible in theory”

-Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize winner, Economic Sciences

The Evolution of Our Work

In Spring 2019, Shorefast hosted a four-day long event titled Economics for Belonging, challenging dozens of thinkers and doers to identify how we can tether our economies to the places we live.

In response, Shorefast launched the Community Economies Pilot – a pan-Canadian project engaging organizations from fire geographic communities representing community development, philanthropic, financial, and public sectors. Answering the question “How do we strengthen community economies?”, the pilot identified four levers for change: attract and retain financial capital, access and leverage data, strengthen and support local capacity, and create architectures for collaboration.

The Shorefast Network is the culmination of these learnings and is creating programming, events, and toolsets to activate the four levers in communities and amplify economies in service of place.

The Network Connects and Serves

Communities

Entrepreneurs

Economic Development Professionals

Policy Makers

Academics

Non-Profits

Businesses

Thought Leaders

Projects & Toolsets

Current projects and toolsets delivered through The Shorefast Network:


Economic Nutrition


Community Business Hub


The PLACE Framework

– a collaboration with Memorial University, St. John’s Newfoundland


Community Economies Pilot


Community Data Scorecard, mapping your community’s economy

in development


Learning by practice

– we learn through our practice of holistic development on Fogo Island, see Our Work on Fogo Island for details

Network Resources

While we work on building a dedicated digital platform, we invite you to review our latest additions to our resources:


Community Economies Pilot

– A Program Agenda for Canada


Community Economies Pilot

– Final Pilot Report


Leadership in Place

– Zita Cobb delivering the Thomas d’Aquino Lecture on Leadership


Economics for Belonging

– After-Words Report

Foundational Thinkers

Our approach to place-based economic development takes influence from multiple perspectives.  Here are some of the thinkers whose work we have benefitted from.

E.F. Schumacher

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher CBE (1911 – 1977) was a German-British statistician and economist. His book Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered published in 1973 outlines the importance shifting economic development goals away from traditional profit-maximizing objectives. To quote E.F. Schumacher, “The size of the business or an economy is not a measure of its success, but the well-being and happiness it brings to peoples’ lives”.

Recommended Read: Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered

John McKnight

John McKnight is the Co-Founder of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at DePaul University and Senior Associate at the Kettering Foundation. McKnight in collaboration with Jody Kretzmann identified the exclusion of local actors in social policymaking and conducted research on how to make those assets visible, which resulted in the creation of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD). ABCD is an economic development strategy driven by the community. The approach focuses on the identification and mapping of assets already in place within a community. 

Recommended Read: The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods

Gill Chin Lim

Gill Chin Lim (1946-2005) was a prolific urban planner and scholar who coined the phrase ‘humanistic globalization’. Humanistic globalization is the realization of a civil society based on the human values of peace, love, justice, affluence, and equality and the human needs to sustain a just society, which are food, security, housing, health, and education. He championed the importance of engaging people different from ourselves to learn from both our differences and our commonalities.

Recommended Read: Globalization, spatial allocation of resources and spatial impacts: A conceptual framework, a chapter by Gill Chin Lim featured in the book Globalization and Urban Development

Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom (1933 – 2012) was a political scientist and economist and was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. In her book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action published in 1990, she identified eight design principles present in the governance of common resources: (1) Clearly defined boundaries , (2) Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions, (3) Collective-choice arrangements, (4) Monitoring , (5) Graduated sanctions, (6) Conflict-resolution mechanisms, (7) Minimal recognition of rights to organize, and (8) Nested enterprises.

Recommended Read: Governing the Commons: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

Raghuram Rajan

Raghuram Rajan is an economist and the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. His 2019 book The Third Pillar makes the case that there are three pillars that support society: government, business, and community, and that they are currently out of balance. He argues that the community pillar has been neglected and that until we see community as an integral part of resilience, the economic system will continue to fail us.

Recommended Read: The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander (1936 – 2022) was an architect and designer and worked as a   professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He championed the belief that people should be at the center of designing houses, cities, and systems, not professionals external who is being impacted. His theories of human-centered design impacted industries beyond architecture, influencing city planning and even software development. His book, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction written with his colleagues Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, offered a language to empower anyone to be able to design and build anything from houses to communities at any scale.

Recommended Read: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

The Shorefast Network Team + Fellows

Founder and CEO

Zita Cobb

Growing up on Fogo Island, Zita developed a deep belief in the inherent value of place and profound respect for the human ways of knowing that emerge from respectful relationships with nature, culture, and community. She held senior financial roles in the high-tech industry, notably with JDS Fitel, subsequently JDS Uniphase, where she contributed to building the company into one of the most successful high-tech innovators in history. Zita returned home to Fogo Island in the early 2000’s and, along with her brothers Anthony and Alan, founded Shorefast. In 2016, Zita was awarded the Order of Canada. She volunteers her time and energies to the active direction and management of Shorefast and our projects on Fogo Island.

Executive Vice President

Susan Cull

Susan is Executive Vice President of Shorefast, a community economic development organization based on Fogo Island, NL.  Susan has over 15 years experience working in community development, having previously worked with the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador on social and economic community data development projects, and after a move back home to Fogo Island, as the Chief Administrative Officer with the municipality before joining Shorefast in 2017.  At Shorefast, Susan’s role encompasses many facets of the organization so no two days are alike, which is just fine with her – her favourite part of community economic development is ‘everything’: the innovation and collaboration it takes to get projects off the ground makes for exciting, challenging, and deeply meaningful work.

Senior Fellow

Mary Rowe

Mary W. Rowe is President and CEO of the Canadian Urban Institute (CUI). For over 30 years, Mary has acted as an impassioned civic leader and a leading urban advocate championing place-based approaches to building livable and resilient cities.

Living in Canada and the United States, Mary has supported policy transformation efforts and has led local, national and international urban initiatives such as the self-organizing initiatives that emerged in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, the initial development of Imagining the Civic Commons in key cities across North America, and the engagement components of HUD-supported Rebuild by Design that informed the creation the 100 Resilient Cities program of the Rockefeller Foundation. She is also Senior Fellow with Shorefast and is a contributor to national and international city-building programs such as UN Habitat, Ottawa City Building Summit, Livable Cities Forum, Mansueto Institute Summit, the Art of City Building, and the inaugural meeting of the G7 Urban Development Ministers in Potsdam, Germany. Under Mary’s leadership, CUI has expanded its work to include an international network from government, industry, community and city-building professions to advance research and collaborate on solutions to some of our greatest urban challenges.

Executive Vice President

Diane Hodgins

Diane Hodgins is Executive Vice President of Shorefast where she focuses on economic development practices that catalyze the assets of local places.  She serves as a “numeric linguist”: a translator for the complex and often ambiguous language of business and finance, building tools like Economic NutritionCM which answers the all-important question: “Where does the money go?”  Using a whole-thinking approach that puts people and place at the centre of decisions, she and her team create systems that invest in nature and culture creating social and economic value in tandem.

Financial Innovation Lead

Gwen Patrick

Gwen Patrick is the Financial Innovation Lead of the Shorefast Network. In her role, Gwen leads the execution of Network programming and toolset development in the areas of finance and accounting. Her childhood on Salt Spring Island invoked a passion for maintaining the uniqueness of a place while adapting to the global economic landscape. Gwen founded the Foundation of Youth, a youth advisory committee of the Salt Spring Island Foundation. Her work in the philanthropic sector identified a need for accessible financial literacy, prompting her to obtain a Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University. While at Queen’s, Gwen was awarded the Kehoe Fellowship and completed the Kehoe Internship with Shorefast on Fogo Island. After her internship, Gwen obtained her CPA designation and worked as a financial statement auditor at Deloitte before returning to Shorefast.

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Shorefast creates and shares new ways to care for the health of coastal and oceanic ecosystems while supporting the culture of people whose lives and livelihoods are linked to the sea.  

Through multi-pronged initiatives, we seek to achieve the following:  

• Build awareness of Fogo Island’s waterways and the Labrador Current as critical to helping meet the climate challenge.   

• Engage with community members in environmental stewardship practices on Fogo Island and look for ways to adapt our learnings for other coastal and rural communities.

• Facilitate research that expands our knowledge of Fogo Island’s natural environment.

•Promote responsible development of our natural assets, including marine and other wildlife, geology, and land vegetation.

Today, Shorefast’s five major Environmental Stewardship initiatives are:

Habitat Stewardship and Conservation

Shorefast is involved in initiatives that promote habitat stewardship and conservation efforts. Some of these initiatives are funded via a partnership with Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ (DFO) Coastal Communities Conservation Opportunities Initiative (CCCOI). Shorefast also facilitates research inputs by leveraging our community relationships with fishers and other practitioners.

Examples Include:

    • Facilitating data collection regarding lobster stocks, capelin, and oceanographic information (temperature and sea level data). These inputs are returned to DFO to help build local data sets.
    • Organizing and executing shoreline clean-ups.
    • Installing seabins to reduce marine debris.
    • Youth projects including constructing and installing eider duck shelters with students on Change Islands, facilitating conservation-themed guest speakers at Fogo Island Central Academy, and World Ocean’s Day programming in collaboration with the Town of Fogo Island and other local organizations.

Sustainable Harvest: Seaweed Pilot Project

Alongside the Fogo Island Co-operative Society, Shorefast is leading research and development towards the establishment of Newfoundland and Labrador’s first commercial seaweed cultivation operation in the name of economic diversification and climate preparedness. We are partnered with Marine Institute (MI) at Memorial University of Newfoundland on this initiative, and Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation (CCFI) is our funding partner.

Both Shorefast and the Fogo Island Co-operative Society believe deeply in the potential benefits of seaweed cultivation, which include significant carbon sequestering properties as well as habitat enhancement for existing species such as lobster. If seaweed cultivation proves successful in our waters, this crop could represent a significant economic diversification potential for Fogo Island and contribute to local and global food security.

Shorefast is seeking to lay groundwork for commercial seaweed cultivation such that local fishers can take on seaweed as an addition to their existing harvesting businesses, and the Co-op can add seaweed processing to their business model.

Sustainability Planning

In 2021, Shorefast began a concerted, organization-wide sustainability and waste audit process to work towards a deeper understanding of our organization’s environmental impact and to strengthen our internal culture of environmental stewardship.

We are partnered with Newfoundland-based climate action consulting firm Fundamental Inc. to establish our own internal Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission inventory and develop the Shorefast environmental policy and mission statement. We’re building internal capacity and identifying our cross-functional environmental leadership team and data reporting structures.

Starting with our own projects and businesses, we’re developing a model for similar organizations and communities to take a GHG inventory and set goals towards improving upon waste and carbon outputs. Our work can help create a roadmap for doing this complex, intensive work so as to be scaled and replicated by other organizations and communities around the globe. We plan to create and offer resources about this process in the not-too distant future.

Residencies

Shorefast invites experts in various fields to come to Fogo Island to share their specialized knowledge with the community and lead public programming. Experts include geologists who lead educational hikes and host youth programming at our Geology Centre.

Community Science

Shorefast runs or participates in several Community Science initiatives which engage members of the general public in on-the-ground research.

These include: Summer youth programming that allows school-aged children to participate in workshops themed around marine debris and aquatic invasive species; training and research activities in collaboration with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans; an Ocean Atlas project, which aims to build an online platform to share data about the natural environment around Fogo Island with community members; and more.

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Heritage Preservation

Shorefast has invested in restoring over 20 heritage properties, including homes, churches, and public buildings in order to preserve, share, and foster contemporary relevance for the traditional ways of knowing that tie people to place.

The wooden structures of Fogo Island have withstood the harshest Northeast gales. The good news? Salt air preserves, and there is a lot of life left in even the most neglected of buildings in our community.

Devoted to knowledge preservation as well as encouraging engagement with the heritage assets of the inshore fishery, the Punt Premises is one example of Shorefast’s many heritage restoration projects.

The Punt Premises is home to Shorefast’s fleet of punt boats and an evolving curation of cultural artifacts including cod traps, boatbuilding tools, fishing gear, photos, and other noteworthy items that are associated with the traditional inshore fishery. The Punt Premises brings to life how a family made a living in the vibrant inshore fishing era on which our outport culture was founded. It has become a platform for a range of cultural and community engagement activities

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Youth Programming

Shorefast is committed to leveraging our internal organizational capacity in service of the next generation of community leaders. We dedicate time and resources to four major initiatives in collaboration with our local school, teachers, and students.

Mentorship Program and Career Growth

We provide job shadowing opportunities for grades 10-12 at Shorefast workplaces—including Fogo Island Inn, Fogo Island Workshops, construction/facilities management, and business supports—where they can engage with staff and learn about future career paths on Fogo Island.

Fogo Island Scholarship Lottery

Our yearly lottery raises funds for Fogo Island Central Academy graduating students attending any form of post-secondary education, with a proportional amount sent to A.R. Scammell Academy on Change Islands. To receive scholarship funds, students are asked to write an opinion-based essay or create a work of art, which is displayed in a celebratory public exhibition at the Punt Premises.

School Garden

We partner with teachers at Fogo Island Central Academy to plant small-scale vegetable plots with the younger students. Through this initiative, children are introduced to a range of plants and vegetables that grow well in our specific climate and start to become familiar with issues of food security and nutrition.

Guest Speakers and Other Special Appearances

On a monthly basis, Shorefast facilitates guest speakers on various subjects at Fogo Island Central Academy. Many talks are related to our Environmental Stewardship work, though other practitioners (artists, architects, chefs) have been known to make appearances.

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