Some ideas arrive loudly. Others appear briefly and are gone just as quickly. A few arrive quietly and refuse to leave. This was one of those. It did not announce itself or resolve into a clear thought at first. It returned instead, again and again, attached to ordinary moments, until ignoring it required more effort than paying attention.
Noticing how money moves
I noticed it first in how my own bills were handled. They arrived on schedule. I paid them without discussion. No one asked for my opinion, and I did not offer one. The process required no persuasion, no meetings, and no renewed agreement. It worked because it was expected to work. It had been designed to continue.
At the time, I did not think of this as anything more than routine. It was simply how things were done.
The pattern only broke when one bill demanded attention. My electricity cost was higher than usual, enough to be noticed. I did what most people do in that situation. I looked more closely. I compared rates and read the fine print, with the simple goal of lowering the bill.
What I found did not simplify the problem. The companies differed in name, but not in design. Behind them sat the same wholesale structures, the same settlement processes, the same quietly enforced rules about how money flowed and who carried risk. Many were connected through the same operational backbone, even when that connection was not obvious at first glance.
Prices varied, but the structure behind them remained largely the same. The rate itself, I realised, was only part of the picture.
That realization shifted the focus. It was no longer about finding a better price or a more agreeable brand. It was about understanding the structure itself.
I saw this collection of independent companies with the same operating model, much like a franchise, even if it was never described as one.
It was then that the thought I had been avoiding returned, this time with clarity rather than irritation.
When observations begin to connect
The idea did not arrive as a plan. It raised questions instead. What would it mean to step into a franchise type of system? What obligations would come with it? And what, if anything, would change if the structure remained the same but the intention did not?
The idea might have ended there, if it had not begun to attach itself to other experiences. I found myself thinking about a fundraising event I had attended years earlier. It had been well run and successful. People gave generously, and something useful came from it.
What stayed with me was not the event itself, but the effort surrounding it. The planning. The coordination, and the reliance on the right people being available at the right moment.
I did not connect these observations immediately. One belonged to everyday systems. The other to human effort. They occupied different parts of life, with no obvious reason to be considered together.
I began to wonder why some forms of activity move forward without attention, while others depend so heavily on it. Why certain flows continue regardless of who is present, while others must be consciously restarted.
This was not a criticism of anyone involved. Every situation is different. People act according to circumstance, and circumstances change. What interested me was not the outcome of any single effort, but the weight placed on the people who must continually recreate it.
The thought that followed was tentative. It did not present itself as an answer. It sounded more like a question asked quietly, and then asked again: is there a way for some kinds of support to exist without requiring constant attention?
What it means to build something that lasts
By this point, I was holding three related experiences in mind, even if I had not yet named them that way.
One was the way my own bills were handled — quietly, predictably, without requiring attention or persuasion. Once set in motion, the process continued on its own.
The second was the structure behind those bills. Different companies, different names, but the same underlying operating model — a framework that could be repeated, transferred, and run reliably by different hands without changing how money moved.
The third was the fundraising effort I remembered — effective, well intentioned, and dependent on people continually showing up to do the work.
They belonged to different parts of life, and at first there seemed no reason to place them side by side.
What changed was not the experiences themselves, but my willingness to look at them together. Once I did, the space between them became visible. One was designed to continue regardless of who was present. The other existed only while people actively sustained it. Neither was wrong. They were simply built for different kinds of reliability.
What it suggested was that there might be a way to apply corporate thinking to fundraising, not to replace it, but to carry part of its work forward through structure rather than repeated effort.
That realisation was energising. It suggested that effort and continuity did not have to be bound together. That people could still come together when needed, while the corporate portion of the work carried on in the background. The question that formed was not whether this should happen, but whether it could.
Excitement did not remove the weight of the idea. If anything, it made the responsibility clearer. Any structure built to carry responsibility forward would need to be approached with care — not only for what it enabled, but for what it constrained. Once established, it would shape behaviour long after the original intention had faded.
Corporate money carries power because it moves reliably. Once a flow is established, decisions begin to form around it. Priorities adjust. Expectations settle. What was once voluntary becomes assumed. This is not inherently good or bad, but it is never neutral. When the idea took the form of a company, that reality became unavoidable. A structure designed to move money quietly carries power whether it intends to or not, and that power invites questions. Explanation, then, is not a response to criticism, but a requirement of operating such a structure in the open.
Canmore Legacy exists to record moments like this, before decisions harden into structures. It is not an argument for a particular outcome, nor a claim that one approach fits every circumstance. It is an attempt to make the thinking visible.