Fogo Island (Part 3)
What does regenerative economics look like on the ground?

A reflective documentary in three parts

Part III — The Ocean Ahead (Future)

Fogo Island today is not a finished story; it’s a living tide. Community businesses reinvest surpluses into programmes and micro-loans that illuminate and regenerate the island’s assets. The past still hurts; the sea is still perilous; resilience is still learned in winter. And yet—there is a widening practice of regenerative place-making:

Place is a verb, not a noun.

It is a sensibility—something we come to feel and believe. It is a living, relational process, not a static location.

The architecture of place is built through entangled agents of relationship—schools, community restaurants, workshops—spaces that generate connection and belonging. Non-places, by contrast, are interchangeable nodes designed without memory.

On Fogo Island, the question has evolved:

What else is needed for these relationships to thrive? Health? Education? Care infrastructure? How do we cultivate relationships that not only sustain a place—but make it resilient, alive, and truly ours?

From here, the tide runs outward. The Punt Chair continues to carry stories across thresholds. The Inn continues to convert attention into livelihoods. The Co-op continues to adapt. What began as a shorefast on a single trap has become a practice of tying flows—of money, care, imagination—back to land.

“What do we have? What do we know? What do we love? What do we miss? And, what can we do about it?”

Shorefast has shown what “life-ennobling economics” might look like: a rebalancing—from work as job to work as livelihood; from extraction to regeneration; from singular capital to many currencies—money, story, trust, care. That care can be an economy; that life itself, in all its mess, is the infrastructure that sustains it.

Seasons of uncertainty will come, as they always have. But the island has learned to tighten its shorefasts, to ask better questions, and to treat place as a living verb.

And for other places watching the horizon—coastal towns, prairie cities, inland villages—the invitation is plain as a rope in the hand: to invest regeneratively in place, to fund processes not just projects, to grow agents of relationship, and to return value to the shore that made it.

Through our understanding of regenerative flows on Fogo Island, we are exploring what this might look like both for the island’s future and the future of other places across Canada. Systemic resilience will be built collaboratively across sectors, knowledge bases, worldviews, and forms of capital. It is too important to do otherwise. We invite you to join us in this exploration.

LEE Shifts observed on Fogo

BEYOND LABOUR 

Traditional Model: Labour as a contract: fixed hours, fixed roles, fixed hierarchy. Economic value tied to paid work.

Fogo Illustration: Before factories and electricity, Fogo Islanders didn’t “have jobs”—they had roles in an ecosystem. Every family was entrepreneurial by necessity, adapting daily to weather, and abundance. Their wealth was relational and ecological: knowledge of the inshore grounds, mutual reliance, seasonal rhythms.

When industrial fish plants arrived, they introduced wage labour and contracts. Yet the community resisted a purely extractive model. Through the Fogo Island Cooperative, processing became organized at scale without erasing the autonomy of fishers. Membership—and therefore ownership—remained open to Islanders. Decisions on prices, bonuses, and investments were made collectively, ensuring that labour remained rooted in dignity, reciprocity, and shared prosperity.

BEYOND GOVERNANCE 

Traditional Model: Centralized governance structures—often far from the communities they regulate—determine how local resources should be managed. Top down policies and economic decisions prioritize efficiency and productivity.

Fogo Illustration: Governance as collective stewardship, grounded in lived knowledge and organized around community needs and capabilities. Fogo’s transformation in the 1960s is a powerful example: faced with resettlement pressures, Islanders chose to reorganize through a community-owned cooperative.

The Fogo Island Cooperative – who today accounts for roughly 40% of the GDP of the Island– became a governance model based on relational value:

  • Distributed ownership where every Islander could become a member.
  • Democratic decision-making
  • Local accountability & stewardship

Contributors to the project: Anna Hutchinson, Indy Johar, Raj Kalia, Nathalia Del Moral Fleury, Leon Seefeld, and a special thanks to the team at Shorefast.