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:
Our Model
Shorefast’s innovative model for community economic development has been featured in case studies and academic publications by Harvard Business School, Michigan State University, Memorial University and more.
Network Resources
While we work on building a dedicated digital platform, we invite you to review our latest additions to our resources:
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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