Drive past the Clubhouse on the right Friday morning between September and April, sometime around 8 a.m., and the parking lot looks wrong for the hour. Not golfers. Not the brunch crowd. Rows of cars belonging to people carrying folders into a room that isn't set up for a meal.
That's Leadership Big Canoe, and if you've lived here more than a season you've probably heard someone mention "my LBC class" the way people mention college roommates, with a familiarity that assumes you already know what it is. Most residents don't, not exactly. They know it's a class. They know graduates wear a certain pin or mention a certain year. In fact, this one Friday-a-month program is where a large share of Big Canoe's actual governance gets built, one class at a time, long before anyone runs for the POA Board.
A Small Class With an Outsized Track Record
Leadership Big Canoe is sponsored jointly by the POA and Big Canoe Chapel. Classes meet at the clubhouse one Friday a month at 8:00 a.m. from September to April, usually wrapping by noon, for a $70 program fee that covers the year. According to the POA's own description of the program, more than 450 people have graduated in the last 19 years.
Run the math on that and it's a small cohort most years, somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 graduates per class, not a mass civic movement. The 2022-23 class, its 18th consecutive year, was made up of 28 property owners who spent their first session on a wine and cheese welcome at the Big Canoe Lodge before splitting into project teams the next morning.
That's the part that separates LBC from a typical hobby club. It isn't a lecture series. Each class divides into small teams, and each team is assigned a real problem facing the community, then reports its findings at graduation.
From Classroom Assignment to Actual Nonprofit
Here's where it stops being theoretical. At one LBC graduation, then-POA President Dick Scharf told the graduating class that the program functions as a community "think tank," and pointed to two concrete outcomes that had come directly out of LBC team projects: the Wellness Collaborative and the current governance model.
That's not a vague compliment. The Big Canoe Wellness Collaborative is a real, currently operating nonprofit, an all-volunteer group that provides short-term, non-emergency, non-medical wellness services to residents. It exists today because a class project years ago identified the need and someone followed through. That same graduation's teams had also studied a proposed multi-generational community center and ways to increase amenity use and revenue through better marketing to short-term renters and wedding business, the kind of groundwork that quietly shapes decisions long after the class disbands.
Two Candidates, One Shared Credential, Same Board Race
The clearest evidence that LBC feeds directly into Big Canoe's leadership isn't a policy, it's two names on the same ballot. When four property owners ran for open seats on the POA Board in 2018, two of them, Grant Grimes and Steve Wilson, both listed Leadership Big Canoe on their credentials. Grimes, a 2018 LBC graduate, had moved into Big Canoe in December 2015 and worked his way through the Fire Station Task Force before becoming a volunteer firefighter and eventually chairing the Long Range Planning Committee. Wilson, a retired attorney, had developed a children's reading program before completing LBC in an earlier class and later sitting on its board.
Neither ran on the strength of the class alone. But the pattern holds across years: LBC alumni turn up again and again as board candidates, committee chairs, and task force volunteers, because the class is explicitly designed to convert curiosity about how Big Canoe works into a continuous commitment to keep working on it after graduation.
Where the Rest of the Calendar Comes From
Once you see LBC as the training ground, the rest of Big Canoe's club scene reads differently. It isn't a random scattering of hobby groups. It's a set of organizations that draw on the same volunteer base, often meeting in the same two or three rooms.
Group | When it meets | Where | What it actually does |
|---|---|---|---|
Rotary Club of Big Canoe | First three Thursdays, 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. | Big Canoe Chapel | Presented an $8,000 check to the Pickens County Weekend Snack Program and collects home medical equipment with Dawson County Rotary |
Big Canoe Animal Rescue (BCAR) | Ongoing | Community-wide | Entirely volunteer-run, no-kill shelter for dogs and cats in the surrounding mountains |
Big Canoe Wellness Collaborative | Ongoing | Community-wide | Non-emergency, non-medical wellness support for residents, born from an LBC class project |
Chapel Men's Fellowship | Annual golf tournament, plus a June picnic at Wildcat Pavilion | Chapel and golf course | Biggest annual fundraiser for local charities helping men in need |
Chapel Women's Fellowship | Ongoing | Chapel | Has raised funds supporting more than 30 local charities focused on women and children |
Wildflower Bunch | Garden in the Woods tour, June 20, 2026 | Private gardens across Big Canoe | Members answer gardening questions on-site during the tour |
Big Canoe Travel Club | Monthly meetings | Clubhouse Overlook Room | Organizes group international trips, from Colombia to a 2026 Norway fjord cruise |
That Overlook Room, incidentally, is the renamed clubhouse event space overlooking Lake Sconti, its name chosen by resident vote when the clubhouse finished its most recent renovation. It's a small detail, but it says something: even the room where the Travel Club meets each month carries a name residents picked for themselves.
What's Actually on the Calendar Right Now
Two threads from this ecosystem are live this month. The Travel Club's "Fjordlands of Norway" trip, a London-to-Norway cruise organized through Dream Vacations owner Mike Ziegenbalg, departs in August 2026 and still had open spots as of the club's late-May meeting. And the Chapel Men's Fellowship golf tournament, which has landed in mid-to-late August for years running, remains the club's largest single fundraiser, the kind of event that turns a Saturday foursome into a check for local charities.
Earlier this summer brought two more markers of the same volunteer infrastructure at work. The Wildflower Bunch ran its Garden in the Woods tour on June 20, opening three private gardens with members on hand to answer planting questions. And the community's amateur radio operators held their Field Day on June 27 and 28, the kind of hobby group that doubles as emergency communication backup when it matters.
They happen because someone, often someone who went through LBC first, decided a gap needed filling and then kept showing up.
Why This Matters If You Already Live Here
The version of Big Canoe most people describe to friends outside the gates is golf, lake, trails, and a clubhouse view. All true. But the version residents actually experience day to day runs on something less visible: a rotating set of volunteer commitments that trace back, more often than not, to a Friday morning class most people have heard of but never quite placed. If you've wondered who decides what gets built, funded, or fixed around here, there's a decent chance the answer started with a folder and a project team, years before it ever reached a board meeting.
If you've got questions about how any corner of Big Canoe actually works, from its clubs to its neighborhoods, Steve Yambor has spent two decades in this community and is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
