At the age of 13, in 1971, Zita Cobb, an eighth-generation Fogo islander, witnessed an event that was to change her life.
One of seven children of a fisherman and his wife of Irish and English descent on this remote Newfoundland island (often described as the most Irish island in the world outside Ireland, and “far away from far away”), she grew up with parents who could neither read nor write in a house without electricity or water.
For centuries the island had been sustained by near-shore cod fishing and a barter economy, but in the 1960s large commercial trawlers arrived and depleted the cod stocks, destroying the traditional livelihoods of the islanders.
Her father, Lambert Cobb, came home one evening with a single cod in his hand, slapped it on the floor, walked out the door, drenched his boat in kerosene and set fire to it. “It was,” she recalls, “a cry of pain and anger. He said to me, ‘You are going to have to go away and study business and figure out this money thing, or it will eat everything we love.’”
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By the time the Canadian government declared a moratorium on fishing, Zita Cobb had left to study in Ottawa. She certainly figured out “the money thing”, going on to make a fortune in fibre optics (she was once the third-highest-paid female executive in America, according to Forbes), and to become one of Canada’s richest women.
In her early 40s she retired, having earned millions, and spent four years sailing around the world in a 47ft yacht. She then decided to return home to Fogo, to give something back to the place of her birth and help reverse the island’s fortunes and the haemorrhaging of its population and knowledge.
“As a child when you are an islander, you think of the island as a ship, as safe as the island keeps me, so it engenders a sense of stewardship in us,” she says over the phone from Fogo.
In 2004 she set up a foundation with two of her brothers, a registered charity called Shorefast (the name comes from the line used to fix cod traps to the shore), and other projects to help economic development in the 400-year-old fishing community in Fogo. Initially she set up scholarships, and then invested $20 million in a luxury hotel called the Fogo Island Inn – a bold, contemporary building standing proud on a headland, designed by Norway-based Canadian architect Todd Saunders. With nods to traditional Newfoundland outport traditions, it is propped up on stilts that are two storeys high. It was constructed in part by Irish workers from Toronto.
Cobb’s philosophy and radical ideas about tourism are based on an economic model where tourism is in service to the community rather than the other way around.
It’s about how to build an economy that underpins the place we live in. It’s about asset-based community development. Place has the answer
— Zita Cobb
“It’s about how to build an economy that underpins the place we live in,” she says. “It’s about asset-based community development. Place has the answer. The questions I ask are: what do we have, what do we love, what do we know, what do we miss and what can we do about it? Place holds nature, and culture is a human response to the nature of a particular place. Place also holds relationships.”
Her approach has been described as a culturally responsible form of entrepreneurship. On the island, it has taken shape with an array of projects including restaurants, a library, a furniture workshop, boat races and artists’ studios. There’s also an ice cream parlour called Growlers, the name locals call the icebergs that float by in winter.
She is also very clear and specific on the difference between experience and information. “Knowledge is experience, whereas what you get with social media is information. Human joy comes from nature and culture. And experience can only be had in the natural world or tangled up with each other.”
Her own independent spirit not only draws from her upbringing but also from the fact that at five, she was diagnosed with TB and spent a year away from her family on the mainland recovering.
The Irish designer Jonathan Legge, founder of the (now defunct) online design store Makers & Brothers and now chief executive of the &Open “uncorporate” gifts company, spent two months on Fogo in 2010/2011 when he was a senior designer at Studioilse in London.
“We were asked for strategic advice for Fogo, how do we go about furniture and furnishings for the hotel? My job was to do a lot of research visiting different communities throughout the island, visiting different women who could sew quilts, visiting boat builders,” he recalls.
He returned the following year in the spring with five designers, their brief being to make as much as they could on the island, tracking the economic provenance. He remembers how welcoming the islanders were “and there was an Irish lyricism to the way they talked, so it felt like being at home. Music is a huge part of the culture, telling stories and songs – Zita is a powerful singer. There are songs about fishing and journeys home – directions on how you navigate home in a song makes sense.” The experience working with the island communities fed into the formation of his first company, Makers & Brothers, in 2011.
A place-based approach capitalises on the unique strengths and assets in the places we live to transform local potential into national prosperity
— Zita Cobb
The island now has a thriving furniture workshop where furniture was made for the hotel. It has a recording studio and artists’ studios, some perched on rocks, others on top of mountains. The pillows and quilts made for the hotel are now sold online. Cobb also organises an annual Great Fogo Island Punt Race, a seven-mile open ocean race in traditional punt fishing boats, which supports the boat builders, keeping the knowledge and skills alive. Owned and run by the community, any surplus revenue from the Fogo Island Inn is channelled back into the Shorefast Foundation to help launch business enterprises or host visiting artists.
“Lessons can always be learned from small islands because they have natural boundaries, and it is much easier to see cause and effect. A small island is a good proxy for a small planet,” Cobb argues. She highlights the documentaries made from the late 1960s by the National Film Board of Canada called Challenge for Change as seminal in illuminating rural and urban poverty. “It really activated things here and drew communities together. People are still learning that you have to co-operate if not collaborate, and through that you can learn different ways of thinking about an economy.”
The Fogo Island Inn, balancing high-quality visitor experience with community benefit, has become a success story. “Last year was the best we ever had at the inn. We don’t have money to advertise, but it slowly builds every year.” Around 40 per cent of guests are Canadian, 40 per cent from the US, and 20 per cent from further afield. Prices start around €1,550 a night.
Cobb has also developed what she calls an economic nutrition bar code explaining where the money goes to on the island when anything is purchased, and another new trailblazing initiative launched this year called the Shorefast Institute for Place-Based Economies, harnessing the power of place. Its stated values are that “we live, work and make meaning in physical locations. When these places thrive economically, so do the people, nature and culture within them. A place-based approach capitalises on the unique strengths and assets in the places we live to transform local potential into national prosperity.”
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Her visit to the Making In festival in Fartha, Co Cork, in September, where she will be a guest speaker, will not be her first time in Ireland. Widely celebrated in Canada and elsewhere and a prolific, tireless and engaging speaker, she came to Dingle in Co Kerry for a break in winter 2018/2019 “and I brought 100 books to read. I didn’t want to talk for two months”. When a local worried that she might not be warm enough, she pointed out that “Dingle is 120 nautical miles further north than Fogo, which is snowbound for many months, but Fogo gets the Labrador current and Dingle the Gulf Stream”.
An avid fan of the late map maker Tim Robinson’s work, she enthuses about how he first came to make maps of the Aran Islands after a visit to a local post office. She is also forthcoming about her Irish and English ancestors – on her father’s side they came from Dorset in the early 1800s to work off a debt; on her mother Stella Penton’s side, she is descended from a David Kerrigan from Cork, who came around the same time. “So coming to Kinsale is a kind of homecoming,” she says.
At Making In, Cobb will join another guest speaker who has transformed the economy of a small island – Tarlach de Blácam, founder of the Inis Meáin Knitting Company and recent recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from Irish Country Magazine. They will have a lot to say to each other.
Making In, the annual gathering of makers hosted by Joseph Walsh Studios, takes place on September 5th and 6th. makingin.org/events
