In early May I visited one of the most beautiful places in Canada, Fogo Island, Newfoundland. It is truly a distinctive place, with welcoming communities, stirring scenery and a long and meaningful history of human settlement. But over and above these attractions, Fogo Island features an extraordinary experiment in place building, led by the philanthropist Zita Cobb, the builder of the Fogo Island Inn and founder of the charitable organization Shorefast. For almost two decades, Zita Cobb has pursued a vision of creating “prosperous economies that serve people, nature and culture in local places”. Since 2004, Zita Cobb and her brothers, all born on Fogo Island, have been on a mission to build economic and cultural resilience on the island. Zita has not only built a world-renowned luxury inn on Fogo but has also helped to create a contemporary arts residency program, a local textile and woodworking social enterprise and many other economic development spin offs to support the resiliency of the Island’s economy. In doing so she has created a model for the application of philanthropic and private capital to helping Canadian communities and places flourish.

Zita Cobb’s thinking about philanthropic capital and its role in place-building has always gone beyond her investments on Fogo Island. The work of Shorefast, the organization she created, is to build, learn and share models of economic development that activate the assets of local places. In 2021, the Shorefast Institute for Place-Based Economies launched a Community Economies Pilot with four other Canadian communities which identified four levers to strengthen community economies: attract and retain financial capital; access and leverage data; build local capacity; and create architectures for collaboration. In 2022, the Shorefast Institute published a program agenda for supporting community economies with concrete suggestions for activating these four levers. As it points out, “the project of strengthening community economies is an urgent national priority that can be one part of the toolkit in addressing the many overlapping crises we face.” This is even more true in 2025 as we face a potentially much worse threat to our economic future.

While this agenda is important for governments and private capital, philanthropic capital also has a role to play. Canadian philanthropists and foundations are already working on building social capital and reinforcing social cohesion. Many of them appreciate the importance of building strong bonds within communities through civic and democratic engagement. But, like many government policy makers, foundations tend to think vertically about issues – health care, food security, mental illness and addiction, green space and housing – and lack a framework for investing in horizontal place-based strategies to deal with a set of interrelated problems in community. This is admittedly difficult to do and arguably it is not in the mandate of foundations to lead the way in funding broad-based community development strategies. Nevertheless, foundations can take advantage of the deep knowledge already available through literature and practice around place based and community economic development.  Shorefast’s research and pilots build on the work of many other Canadian thought leaders – the Coady Institute and its work on asset-based community development; the Tamarack Institute and its work with Vibrant Communities; Social Capital Partners; the Canadian Urban Institute, and others.

Many of these organizations are supported by philanthropy. Foundations such as McConnell, Maytree, Metcalfe, Atkinson, and community foundations across Canada have invested in place-based initiatives to strengthen local communities, whether urban or rural. Newer foundations such as NorthPine and Definity, in addition to Shorefast, are choosing to invest in communities as a priority. But they are not being guided by a common framework around their community investments.

If philanthropic funders took as a frame the four levers of capital, capacity, data and architecture for community collaboration, they would be guided by what the research suggests are the most essential elements to thriving in place. Too many foundations focus only on the social and cultural aspects of thriving community. The vertical silos that divide social and industrial policy in government are mirrored in philanthropy which often limits itself to meeting social needs (poverty, illness, food security, etc) rather than strengthening economic assets. Developing strategies to combat community loneliness, isolation, poverty and inequality cannot be divorced from building capability for entrepreneurship, training, and civic infrastructure.

Philanthropic capital can be deployed in many ways to strengthen communities: through investments in financial instruments such as community bonds, mortgages, and community finance funds; through direct impact investments in social enterprises and housing trusts; through grants to collect data, train community leaders and provide support to community dialogues and tables (such as the support to neighbourhood tables provided through the Collective Impact Project in Montreal). I would suggest that philanthropy also can be more urgently and effectively deployed in two areas that are underfunded by other sources of capital: knowledge building, and advocacy for regulatory and policy change. Shorefast itself provides a model for investing in knowledge building both within communities and across sectors. By sponsoring research, convening dialogues, and creating or repurposing spaces in community for dialogue, philanthropic funders can support community voice and consensus-building, and bring business and government decision-makers and investors to the community table. Philanthropy can also fund the development of policy solutions and support advocacy for those solutions to be adopted, in collaboration with community leaders. Many legal and regulatory policies could be reformed for example to support more community investment in local assets and to facilitate creative philanthropic capital deployment to communities.

When I left Fogo Island, Zita Cobb gave me the gift of a beautifully crafted wooden doorstop, made in a Fogo Island workshop.  She reminded me that if we hold doors open to each other across our country, “we can do a lot, if we do it together.” Philanthropy can play that invaluable role of holding doors open for citizens, businesses and governments to come together to strengthen community, if we are bold enough.