Page 24 - ECF_Thrive_Summer2025_flipbook

Fogo Island
Framework
Zita Cobb returned to her home island
to help build its economy and protect
its culture. She ended up spreading its
success far beyond its shores
By CORY SCHACHTEL
s a former CFO who helped turn JDS Uniphase,
an international communications technology
company, into one of the most successful
high-tech innovators of all time, Zita Cobb knows the
language of money. But for the earliest part of her life,
she barely spoke it at all.
“We traded fish for the things we couldn’t
otherwise secure — it was almost as if I grew up in
a pre-money time,” Cobb says of her childhood in
1960s Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland and
Labrador. There, she grew up the youngest (and only
girl) of seven children, among just under 6,000 people
“who knew how to make a living on the North Atlantic,
which is not the easiest thing in the world.”
Things got harder when Cobb, an eighth-generation
Fogo Islander, was eight years old. After 400 years, the
island’s inshore-fishing industry collapsed due to an
unprecedented threat: “the arrival of these monster
factory ships from everywhere on Earth.” In the span
of 10 years, modern industry displaced centuries of
culture, constraining locals’ tiny cod fishing boats —
which had never ventured farther than five miles off
the coast — even closer to shore.
At first, the older generations couldn’t understand
who in their right minds would fish until there’s nothing
left to catch, until one day her father figured it out: They
must be turning the fish into money. “So when I was 10
years old, he came to me and said, ‘When you grow up,
you’re going to have to go away and you’re going to have
to figure out how this money thing works. Because if you
don’t, it’s going to eat everything we love.”
Cobb went away to figure out money at Carleton
University in Ottawa, but she had big city things to
figure out first, “not the least of which was electricity.
24 Together we thrive
I remember seeing my first escalator — that was a big
thing — and I didn’t know how to use a bus. To this day,
Fogo Island still has two stop signs, and no traffic light.”
With a career that would be the envy of any
businessperson, it’s safe to say Cobb figured this money
thing out. But along the way she found a modern world
of “placelessness” in which people simply exist to work,
disconnected from their immediate environments
beyond how those surroundings can serve them. “And
when that fundamental relationship to the world is
broken, I don’t think humans are at our best.”
It wasn’t Cobb’s plan all along to come home after
her career. But after seeing the widespread effects of the
corporate world taking local places for granted (“On a
good day, corporations are place agnostic — on a bad day,
they’re downright hostile”), she felt compelled to protect
her hometown. So in 2004, with her father’s words in mind
and working with two of her brothers, Cobb returned
home with a plan “to put place in the economy.”