NEWS - March 20, 2026

Shorenet Stories: Prince Edward County

Posted by Shorefast Institute

Welcome to our blog series – Shorenet Stories – profiling members of Shorenet’s first learning cohort. Shorenet is a dynamic national network committed to strengthening place-based economic development across Canada.

Shorenet was piloted in 2025 with a learning cohort of eight communities from across the country: South Vancouver Island, BC; Battle River, AB; Scarborough, ON; Newmarket, ON; Prince Edward County, ON; Upper Fundy Coast & Foothills, NB; Gros Morne, NL; and Fogo Island, NL. The group met virtually for several months before coming together on Fogo Island for an immersive training experience called “Fogo Sessions”.

Through this series, we’ll learn more about our Shorenet participants, what inspired their involvement in this initiative, what they hope to achieve in their own communities, and how Shorenet is helping them get there.

Next up: Prince Edward County, ON.

A sandy beach with trees and a road reaching toward blue water in the background.
Image Credit: Daph & Nico

Prince Edward County’s Tourism as An Economic Development Engine 

A group of people sit around a table participating in a discussion. In the foreground, a woman with a yellow sweater and a man with a blue sweater are slightly blurry. Three people are seated and looking to the right.
Image Credit: Siân Melton

Prince Edward County (PEC) is a community nestled on the shores of Lake Ontario in southeastern Ontario. Known for its vibrant tourism sector, PEC been recognized as one of Conde Nast’s Best Places to Go in 2026. The thriving visitor economy is stewarded by local organizations focused on sustainable tourism management, economic diversification, and improving the quality of life of PEC residents. 

In 2021, PEC was one of five communities selected by the Shorefast Foundation to join the Community Economies Pilot Project. Their participation culminated in the launch of Thrive PEC, a collaboration between multiple local PEC organizations. The collaboration focuses on community and economic development in the region, playing a key role in addressing some of the community’s most pressing challenges. 

For Eoin Callan of Bloom Impact Capital and Community Futures, PEC’s participation in the Pilot was animating. “We had hundreds of conversations with residents in the community. We found that the questions around assets and how to activate them had an immediate effect – which was to bring people together to overcome those initial divisions and begin to look ahead 10 years and think about the kind of place that we want to build.”

Moving from Collaboration into Action

This work led to PEC’s participation in the inaugural cohort of Shorenet in 2025 – an experience that continues to shape their approach to community development to date. 

As for the original Pilot, it was a starting point for something bigger. “We were able to translate that initial architecture for collaboration into action and have since been able to attract investment and resource great projects on the ground,” Callan reflects.

For Sarah Fox, Executive Director of Visit the County, it’s critical to think about the full picture. Visit The County’s mission is to support local tourism businesses, develop visitor experiences, deliver frontline visitor services, and advocate for sustainable tourism management. “At its core, it’s about community development,” Fox explains. The first step is attracting visitors, which often leads to them looking for work in the area and eventually to stay. “It’s a wonderful cycle.” 

Image Credit:  Siân Melton

Addressing Challenges with Collaborative Solutions

To help bridge that gap, investments for training and job opportunities are essential, says Christine Durant, Program Coordinator at the Prince Edward Learning Centre (PELC), a charitable nonprofit established in 1996 to support lifelong learning and community well-being in PEC.  

“And then there’s the challenge of overtourism,” Fox adds, an issue that became particularly visible during COVID. Fox reflects on their participation in the Shorenet cohort as formative in responding to these challenges. “It was a great learning experience that has informed our practices.”  

And then there was the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of being on Fogo Island for the Fogo Sessions. Fox notes that the online workshops were a great introduction to the programming offered by the in-person Fogo Sessions on Fogo Island, a key offering of the Shorenet program. “It’s always great to take the virtual world into real life interaction, it’s so meaningful when you connect face to face,” she says. “The intentionality of slowing down, not having your devices was also refreshing.” 

Learning on Fogo Island: Fogo Sessions

Three people hiking with walking sticks on a rocky landscape.
Image Credit: Siân Melton
“From a tourism perspective, I was soaking it all in and taking notes,” shares Fox. Another key takeaway was learning about the Economic NutritionCM label, an initiative of Shorefast Institute that reorients spending around the places we live by implementing a label that shows where the money goes when making a purchase. “We hope to implement that in PEC in the future,” she adds. 

Both Fox and Durant noted the benefits of watching fellow communities present case studies about issues that everyone shares, demonstrating the commonalities in the group, despite the differences. “It was a great opportunity to really connect to other communities, learn about best practices and innovative ideas, and enjoy the incredible network,” says Fox. “It lifted us all up.” 

Durant agrees. Before joining the Fogo Sessions, she had been navigating an especially busy period at work, tackling complex issues as income equity, homelessness and cracks in the system. The experience offered a rare moment to pause and reflect. “It was nice to think about how we fit into a bigger system,” says Durant, who supports a holistic approach to community development – one that embraces place-based development.  
The Fogo Sessions let Durant see the bigger system in an immersive way: “We were viewing ourselves from the outside looking in, to see assets we weren’t looking at,” she says of the opportunity. The sessions provided a chance to brainstorm together and come up with different ideas for advancing their respective missions. Durant was particularly inspired by Fogo Island’s story and how economic history and community were deeply ingrained in its development efforts – PEC has its own powerful history of shipbuilders and community. The question for Durant now becomes: how can we leverage untapped assets to replicate that [Fogo success]? “There are some great stories that we could tell too, that could build local pride,” she says. 

As Durant and Fox work through the Shorenet curriculum, each are thinking about how to incorporate their new learnings into community development activities. They’re equally eager to find ways of working with their pilot partners in the future. The experience has been profound, says Durant. “What an honour to have been a part of this.”  

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From coast to coast to coast, communities are finding new ways to grow local economies that work for the people who call them home. The posts below bring together voices, ideas, and experiences from place-based economic development practitioners across Canada. Explore, get inspired, and see what's possible.
A sandy beach with trees and a road reaching toward blue water in the background.

Shorenet Stories: Prince Edward County

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