Fogo Island – community rooted in place
Photo by Iain Duncan
I have a special assignment coming up on Tuesday.
As part of the Rising Economy Conference hosted by the South Island Prosperity Partnership, we have invited Zita Cobb to headline the gathering. You have probably heard about Zita over the last decade as the creator of the legendary Fogo Island Inn and founder of the Shorefast Foundation. Zita is a no-nonsense force in the world when it comes to economic development, social enterprise and community. She does not suffer fools and the way she says things sticks with you for a very long time. If you ever have the chance to meet Zita – you will never forget it.
It also puts a big smile on my face to tell you that she is a friend and mentor of mine – and I will have the experience of interviewing Zita in a house full of my own neighbours.
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In 2023, I spent a month on Fogo Island as part of my writing sabbatical. I had been to Fogo Island twice with Power To Give field trips and knew that it was a place that I wanted to spend some extended time. In exchange for some embedded work with Shorefast teams over the month that I was there, I was put up in Sadie’s cottage, a stone’s throw from the Inn. I would write every morning and walk down the road to work with groups every afternoon.
As luck would have it, Zita was on Fogo that April – and we had the chance to spend some time together. This time was filled with the kind of conversations that draw your complete attention away from the sunset happening behind you. These were the kinds of conversations that helped me tap into things I had never thought about before – and reconnect to important themes that I had lost in the shuffle. It was the kind of conversation that changed the tenor of the book I was writing – and the course of the life I have been living since.
Zita believes in the power of place. That every community needs to have a place that it can invite the world to experience what it means to be from that place. She redefines what a ‘resource’ is, and what an ‘asset’ is – and the relationship between the two. She believes in the unifying power of endeavor and she believes in the dignity that comes with meaningful livelihood. And she believes that money will do anything that we tell it to – to create the kind of communities that an increasingly turbulent world will need.
I left Fogo Island seeing my work through the realm of community. The promises of mentorship and indeed leadership, in their truest form, come from this realm of community. It’s where they’ve always lived. Which makes the fact that community is a disappearing way all the more problematic. Mentorship requires the collisions and connections of community. True leadership moves at the speed of community.
For generations, communities have had ways of sustaining themselves…but these ways are deteriorating at a rate greater than they’re being strengthened. Our sense of place is being lost faster than the technological promise to actually connect us is being realized. The dawn of so-called social media made all kinds of promises. People who share a passion will be able to find each other and make things happen! That ended up being a bit of a blessing and a curse. What it actually provided was a way for each of us to find the 50% of the people across the planet who agree with us—not the people who we’re actually in community with. The ones we have to figure out a way forward with.
What social media can’t do is be a place. It can’t drop off a tray of lasagne on the step of a neighbour who’s just lost a relative. It can’t rebuild a barn after the tornado. It can’t swing by and take your kids to soccer practice to save you a trip. A commitment to being in community provides the chance for us to gather and notice each other in situ. To notice if someone has begun to struggle, or recover. To notice if someone is thriving. To notice if someone else is starting to lead, or might be available to us as a resource, maybe even as a mentor or a friend. It allows us to experience and share in the food we eat here, the songs we sing here, and the way we say things here. It’s a place where we take accountability for what we say because we’re going to see each other in the grocery store.
It is in community gathering that we understand the place where we are from. The place we are of. The place where we will be buried or have our ashes scattered.
Some communities still have a way that we can emulate. The sabbatical gave me the chance to spend time in a collection of communities with their backs against the wall. Small prairie towns and island villages up against a threat and hanging by a thread, fighting to protect their livelihoods, values and distinct ways of life. Remote indigenous communities indefatigably working through centuries of adversity and trauma – relying on their language, songs, dances and each other to keep on a healing path.
In these communities, the thought that we don’t need each other is incomprehensible.
It is most notably when a community is vulnerable to being lost that it suddenly realizes its own value. This “value” is difficult to monetize, which is why I sense we ignore it until it is almost gone before realizing with a start that it’s worth fighting for. Most of us fail to see community as an equal pillar to education, government and enterprise.
Because it isn’t equal.
It’s worth more.
For all of you who will be able to join us next week at Rising Economy – I can’t wait to see you and introduce you to my friend, Zita. For everyone else, we will do our best to get some footage of the event. Until then, just keep finding ways to make your community just a little bit stronger today than it was yesterday.
Ian Chisholm
Partner and Co-Founder