Memorial University of Newfoundland Spring Convocation May 27, 2015, 10 a.m. session Address to Convocation Zita Cobb
Thank you. I am honoured by this recognition. It’s a privilege to be here among so many
dedicated and accomplished people.
I was awarded this honour for “my commitment to, and belief in, place.” I would like to
use my time here in company with you today to talk about place... to talk about our
place.
I can’t seem to complete a thought without reaching out for Rex Murphy…
I just discovered Rex quoted in a book by J. Edward Chamberlin called Island: How
Islands transform the World.
Chamberlin says: “… Newfoundlanders have always taken their prospects from the
island they call home....” He goes on to quote Rex, as saying: “Outport is the
characteristic Newfoundland word, the place removed and away, half sanctuary and half
exile, sea dependent and sea-conditioned, generous with challenge, scant with
opportunity, a place at once of intense welcome and hospitality and yet desperately
exposed, precarious and vulnerable. Newfoundland doesn’t have Outports.
Newfoundland is the Outport.” And back to Chamberlin, who says, “Islands give the
world a human shape.”
Fogo Island is also the Outport. It is a deeply emotional and human place. I was born
there to families of Cobbs and Pentons (fishermen and sealers all); I was raised, as an
eighth generation Fogo Islander, in the community of Joe Batt’s Arm. I grew up feral –
just like every other Outport child. Our father, Lambert, fished, went sealing, cut wood,
and did an endless march of other jobs to keep our bodies and souls together. Our
mother, Stella, cooked and cleaned, made fish, dispensed love and discipline and did
the washing on Mondays -- just like everyone else’s mother. She prided herself on
having one of the best clotheslines in Joe Batt’s Arm – and perhaps in all the world?
I grew up out-of-doors – on the bon – coming back home when it got dark. I am 56
years old – not 156 – and I did homework by the proverbial kerosene lamp. Electricity
did not come until Grade 5; there was no running water and no telephones. It was the
Outport Newfoundland of the 1960s.
You learn a lot of things growing up in such a place among such people. Not by what
they tell you, but by what they do. And by what the place itself shows you. My people
are among those with whom the wind and tide sometimes share their secrets. My father
used to say, nature knows everything – you just need to pay careful attention to learn
2 well. Even though we lost many family members – aunts, uncles and even my
grandmother – to the ocean, I learned not be frightened of the natural world, not to be
frightened of the wind, of the cold, or of the dark. I learned stick-with-ed-ness. It came
from what was endured. To give up would have meant that the lives of the people who
came before us would have been for nothing.
And as banal as it sounds, I learned to work with love. I learned that everyone wants to
do their best – even when we sometimes do wrong, maybe tomorrow, we’ll get it right.
At 17 – at the forceful invitation and even more forceful encouragement of my brother
Alan – I went to university in Ottawa. I saw tomatoes for the first time in my life. Day by
day, year by year, while working part-time at Goldstein’s IGA on Elgin Street, I finished
my degree in business. Business is a lovely tool. And as people now educated in
business, you have more potential than most to tackle some of the sticky problems of
the world. Business is a tool that belongs to all of us – and it belongs to communities. It
can be a terrible master if we allow it, but it can be a wonderful servant if we use it
properly. Good businesses and good business people contribute to the fabric that
makes communities healthy and whole. I expect you will do no less than that.
Much of my career was as CFO of a company called JDS. JDS is actually the initials of
the founder, but we used to joke that it meant, Just Do Something.
1989, the year I joined JDS, was practically the beginning of the exploding internet age.
Who remembers what a fax was or that transmission speed was measured in kilobytes,
not in gigabytes? How easy it is to forget – how easy it is to get used to an innovation
that has become part of the air we breathe.
The rapid growth of the internet led to financial wealth for many people including many
of us in that Just Do Something Company. That left me with the challenge of figuring out
what to do next.
Nothing pleased me more than the thought that I could help young people on Fogo
Island get a university education. So I did what you would have done in my shoes – I
established scholarships on Fogo Island. How little I knew what impact those
scholarships would have on my own life.
So imagine this: I go to the high school to a public meeting, excited about the new
scholarships being announced in our parents’ names (our parents, who could not in fact
read and write), when out of the blue a local mother stood up, practically accosted me
and said: “Do you think you are doing good? You are just paying our kids to leave! Yes,
you are helping them get an education, but they will never come back – they’ll just
become managers and fancy people in Toronto, Fort McMurray and St. John’s.” She
was right of course – even a so-called good act could have negative consequences for
someone else’s life, for the life of a community. And then – the kicker – she said, “You
look smart enough… can’t you do just do something to make jobs here?”
Well! She had said a lot.
2 3 I went back to my brothers, Alan and Tony, not knowing quite what to do. Of course, as
Newfoundlanders, some of us have always been stayers, some have been leavers, and
some have been come-back-homers. But these days, too many of us are leavers.
After some anguish, we realized that the only way for an Outport community to survive
and regain its resilience was to do something broad and deep, to fortify community,
dignity, self-esteem, and confidence; to reach out to the world, while at the same time,
holding on to our place. That was a turning point for my life. It led us on this path of
dedicating ourselves to that which we hold most sacred. To place. To home.
And our business skills were the most indispensable part of what we brought to this
challenge.
We established the Shorefast Foundation – a registered charity. Shorefast is a
springboard for a set of social entrepreneurship initiatives aimed at resilience for Fogo
Island. We created Fogo Island Arts and the now-famous Fogo Island Inn. Related to
that, we launched a furniture business, Fogo Island Shop, which sells one-of-a-kind,
drop-dead-gorgeous furniture, quilts, mats and all manner of furnishings, hand crafted
by artisans on Fogo Island and Change Islands. And we have a number of ocean
initiatives that have to do with the fishery and creating higher fidelity relationships with
the ocean and the creatures of the ocean.
We’ve been at this for 10 years now, which is not all that long if you consider our 400year history in this place. This is an ongoing, never-finished, aggravating and delicious
journey of love. It’s a business journey. It’s a community journey.
I want to acknowledge the contribution of my fellow Fogo and Change Islanders, my
colleagues, and the people and governments of this province and Canada, who
believed in and helped us in the beginning, and who continue to believe in and help us
now. This university believed in us then and continues to help us now.
In fact this university believed in and helped Fogo Island in the dark days of the 1960s.
A fellow Fogo Islander, Mr. Don Best, one of our best fishermen and community
leaders, was awarded a degree in 2011 and stood here at this podium and described
what has become known as the Fogo Process. He said: “In the 1960s when the
traditional fishery was collapsing and communities were resettling, Fogo Island was in
crisis. We had to change or move. As a people we decided to stay, and Memorial
University's Extension Service helped us in that decision, and the National Film Board
helped us define what we had to do to ensure our future. This was a time of intense and
passionate involvement by many on the Island and by Memorial. The construction of the
centrally integrated school and the formation of the Co-op became the foundation on
which we built.”
Very well said, Mr. Best.
When we started our projects, which we think of as Fogo Process 2.0, we were told by a
seasoned (maybe I should say case-hardened) community development professional
that this undertaking will be brutally hard, perhaps impossible, because as
Newfoundlanders, he said, we celebrate survival, not success. And also because, while
this is a place of profound intimacy, it is also a place of deep antagonism. That was a
3 4 big, scary thing to hear. And it might have been true. After all, the fishery, which was all
we knew, was a zero-sum game. If I caught the fish, it wasn’t there for the next fellow to
catch. And we can certainly be crooked with each other – of course I mean crooked in
the Newfoundland sense, which means cantankerous.
But all of that aside, to quote Auden, we have learned “to love our crooked neighbour
with our crooked hearts.” We understand that our human existence is made up of
separateness and togetherness. And while I am a daughter of Fogo Island, my
professional experience was in innovation and technology, which is not a zero-sum
game. Innovation gives rise to more opportunity. And I must say I don’t agree with Rex
that Newfoundland offers scant opportunity.
So we held hands and we carried on.
Today, we are all proud of and celebrate what has been accomplished so far – it’s for
survival, for resilience and for success. A recently published article about us said:
"Through a careful mix of modern art, sustainable tourism and a five-star inn, Fogo
Island isn’t just rebuilding itself – it’s set to change how remote communities survive in
the 21st century, and how global travelers seek out truly meaningful experiences."
Thank you for recognizing and celebrating with us today. But tomorrow we must get
right back to work. There is much more ahead of us to do than has already been done.
My JDS boss, Jozef Straus, used to say to us every day, “The most important thing is to
keep the most important thing, the most important thing.” Nature and culture are the
most important things. Not only are they the two great garments of human life, but they
are critical to innovation, critical to our economic well-being – and they are critical to
forging our own singular place in the world as Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.
Nature and culture help us hold onto meaning and to a sense of the sacred in a world
that is increasingly globalized, urbanized, industrialized, virtualized and commoditized.
Nature and culture help us hold on to ourselves and to our way of knowing. They give
us the markers to steer by.
Fellow graduates, graduation is an in-between place – you are in between here and
there. I imagine you feel a mixture of ambition and anxiety. You are crossing an
unknown sea. And the “all or nothing of the world” is both nearby and within you. You
will make choices that will define your lives. Don’t be frightened. Think of yourself as a
navigator, not a warrior. Pay close attention to the navigation clues in front of you. Don’t
sacrifice original ideas for something more comfortable. Hold on to the chain of wisdom
that is our culture. And find an intelligent balance between progress and preservation,
between as Mark Carney said, “a sense of self and a sense of the systemic.” Profit
means nothing without human dignity and healthy communities. Hold on to the song of
the universe and remember that all of us have a civic duty to contribute beauty to the
world. “Just Do Something” and you’ll learn that passion is the result of action, not the
other way around. My colleague Gordon Slade says, “Nobody can do everything, but
everybody can do something.”
Be a good servant. Serve something bigger than yourself and you will have a good life.
And most of all, be a servant of place; of home.
4 5 We all want to live in a world that isn’t just a place. We want to live in a world that holds
home. With your business skills, each and every one of you has the power to help
create such a world.
I am quite sure that if you work as a loving servant of place and home, you will have a
rich and meaningful life.
Thank you all very, very much.
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