Part II — The Return of the Tide 

This is the continuation of the study of Fogo Island as a proof of what regenerative economics looks like on the ground. Part I is accessible here.

Zita Cobb, born on the Island, left to follow her father’s wishes to understand money. She joined JDS in 1989.

“My career was in wave division multiplexing, the little optical components that have enabled the digital age. The consequences of humans having invented this digital technology is that we now have to figure out how the disembodied, the virtual – how it disturbs or supports, or maybe both, our embodied existence.”

She became CFO of JDS.

“As the CFO you have to think about the next quarter and the next quarter and the next…
So then I really started to realize this is how money ends up causing trouble. Because you get ensnared in a kind of a system that you become subservient to.”

In 1999, the company merged with a US company called Uniphase, listed on the NASDAQ.

“And it was in that period that I started to realize that what we, as corporations, were doing was undoing places and undoing life and undoing value.”

Following the cod moratorium, Fogo Island continued to experience population decline. The Fogo Co-operative Society enabled the fishing industry to continue on the island with their expansion into other species, crab and shrimp and the development of offshore equipment like the longliners. However, many fishers left the industry and left the island. Parents told their children: 

“Do not become a marine biologist, there’s no future in the ocean”.  “Don’t waste time learning to fish, there’s no future on the ocean”.  

Over the course of the next decade, an entire generation of young people left the island.

Some returns begin as a call. A memory, a house, a question; a rope taken in hand.

“I left Uniphase in April of 2001 to go sailing. After all these years of being on planes and living in what I would call a flattened world, it was like the world was born again and I was brought back to what I knew from growing up on Fogo Island. Brought back to what forms my basic belief and value system. To know that life has inherent value. And it has meaning, and it has beauty and it has joy. And all those things are in both nature and culture.”

“He inherited 300 years of knowledge specific to one peculiar corner of the Atlantic, far away from far away. And everyday he turned that knowledge to some necessary task. He worked like an animal just to put food on the table. By some ledgers it all came to nothing in the end. But she knew different. There was a significance to the man’s life that was invisible to almost everyone around her. She felt it in her bones. And what the woman who has everything wanted was this: to salvage all that was good and true in her father’s life, to make it visible, to return it to the world.” – Far Away from Far Away, National Film Board of Canada

The curious economist: This is what we call the Legacy Turn. Psychology has long shown that the second half of life—especially for those who have already achieved what society labels as “success” in the first half—shifts from accumulation to contribution.

If the first phase is about learning how the world works, finding our place in it, and responding to external expectations, the second phase is about turning inward: toward intrinsic motivation, deeper passions, and a sense of purpose that is truly our own.

Zita embodies this shift. Her return to Fogo Island was a decisive act of meaning-making: honoring what was life-giving from her upbringing and carrying forward what her father had instilled in her. In coming home, she stepped fully into the work of legacy.

A shorefast is the line that fixes a cod trap to land, keeping it from drifting. In 2004, three siblings—Zita, Alan, and Anthony Cobb—gave that word new civic meaning when they established Shorefast “to strengthen cultural and economic resilience on Fogo Island.”

“So when you ask a question, what can be done? What can I do? What can anyone do? Well then, you’re already committed, because to say I’m doing nothing is to turn around and walk away.“

“Nothing good was going to happen unless somebody made it happen.”

Shorefast began with scholarships—then a mother said, “You’re just paying for our kids to leave. Can’t you do something here?” They started listening deeper. Asset-Based Community Development offered them a compass.

“We needed to back right up and say let’s understand what has value, what has real value, and that’s where you arrived at Asset Based Community Development thinking.”

Shorefast framed their work on Fogo Island by asking a series of critical questions to surface knowledge, worldviews, capabilities, and assets that informed how the organization allocated financial resources to regenerate the inherent potential of Fogo Island. What do we have? What do we know? What do we love? What do we miss? What can we do about it? Hospitality and art were key ingredients that surfaced during this thinking process. 

The curious Economist: Does this remind you of something ? The Fogo Process, a process of creating a web of relationships based on an identity: the Islanders, was the first phase we uncovered in part I that created foundations of the economy of the Island: the coop,and the relations on the basis of which the rest was possible. Here, in this second phase, we observe a similar process of nurturing local culture, local identity, and local agency.

From this process, Design and Art became key elements of the development of the Island. They asked. From that several programs were developed starting with the Shorefast’s residency programs, the now renowned Fogo Island Arts (FIA) international artist residency, is a cornerstone of the organization’s unique story of place-based economic development. The programs invite a wide range of international practitioners to Fogo Island, Newfoundland, to exchange ideas and help build cultural and economic resilience in the community. The exchange creates value both for the artists and the community that enters in a special relationship with the artists.

As an example of the many contributions Shorefast created, we can look closely at how local knowledge has been kept alive: When it looked like punt-building knowledge might vanish—“only eight funerals away”—(punt is a small boat specific to local fishing techniques), a community festival came to provide answers. In 2007, the Shorefast Foundation funded the first ever Great Fogo Island Punt Race to There and Back after several years spent building relationships with boat builders and investing into the craft. Bringing together ten teams of two, the participants rowed the 10 miles from Fogo Island to Change Islands and back. The race created new sources of demand for building punts, strengthened relationships between community members, and enabled present-day Fogo Islanders to maintain a connection to the past. 

In 2010, design stepped in to further strengthen the relationships between the island, the punt, and the craft. Shorefast brought together a group of international designers and local artisans from Fogo Island and Change Islands in a multi-day design workshop, or charette, called Outport Aesthetics. The aim was to co-create the contemporary furniture and furnishings for the Fogo Island Inn using inspiration from the realities of outport living. The event was part of Shorefast’s commitment to “find new ways with old things.” 

French-Canadian designer, Elaine Fortin, was one of the participants of the workshop. Between 2010 and 2013, she visited Fogo Island several times and drew inspiration from the boatbuilder’s intuitive intelligence to use the roots of juniper trees. Juniper trees are harvested once a year in late autumn and left for several months to naturally dry. With the recognition that the craft of building punts was at risk of dying out, Elaine wanted to create something that would allow the techniques to continue to live on. She designed the Punt Chair, using the same method. With the strength of the wood, the chair can be used well and passed down for generations. 

The Punt Chair now sits in its rightful place as a key element of the furnishings of the Fogo Island Inn. After the Inn opened in 2013, Shorefast saw demand for the furniture and craft housed within it, and opened the Fogo Island Workshops, called the Woodshop at the time. In partnership with architect Joseph Kellner, they also contributed to a book about the furniture, design and textiles of the Fogo Island Inn, which was published in 2014. 

The 10th Great Fogo Island Punt Race to There and Back, held in 2017, was also the last to officially run. With the help of generous donations and partnerships, Shorefast refurbished a family home and fishing premises to house the Punt Premises, which opened to the public in 2019. The Punt Premises is an interactive cultural interpretation centre that is bridging memory and the future – a new love letter to the punt. 

The curious Economist: And so a series of events, the punt race, the art residency program, the furniture design, the Punt Premises all contributed to the development of capabilities on the Island, as well as the creation of new entangled agents of relationships. Each a labour of love in their own right, and taken as a whole, they created the enabling conditions for the opening on the Fogo Island Inn: 

In 2013, the Fogo Island Inn opened—rooted in place through its design, construction, and operations. It drew global attention (artists, travelers, researchers) and turned that attention inward, cultivating local supply and livelihoods. Wages rose to include externalities; new enterprises emerged; local residents on the Island experienced the Inn first as guests. 

Generative change takes seasons, even generations. It depends on structures that hold a community without overpowering it. Entrepreneurship, courage, trust, and responsibility mobilizes participation. 

The work remained messy, as all meaningful work is. Visitors sometimes saw only the hotel; headlines rarely captured the water systems under it—or the human systems around it. Yet the current strengthened precisely in the places where numbers thin: trust, story, care.