Courtney didn’t set out to run markets. She set out to survive. A mortgage bank job in Calgary was cut during COVID, a new baby arrived, and eight weeks of government maternity leave ran out faster than anyone warned her it would. She made beaded jewellery to get through it. When her daughter was four months old, she moved them both back to Halifax to be near family, found a job posting for a market director online, and applied. She got it.

For the next five years, she ran someone else’s market. She learned how to pull event permits from the city, navigate the different municipal rules across Nova Scotia, write vendor proposals, and curate a vendor list that never doubled up categories unless a venue asked for it. Her face became the face of that market. People knew her name and showed up because of her. None of it, though, was hers.

When she left and launched The Pop-Up Market, she kept waiting for the community to follow. Some did, but many were confused, unsure whether the market they’d loved was still her business or not, because she’d been the recognizable face of something else for so long. She found herself back at the beginning, messaging strangers on Facebook Marketplace, asking anyone who looked like they made something to please come to her market — the same thing she had done in her very first year, now starting over from scratch.

She works 60 hours a week, out in the city putting up signs, knocking on business doors, handing out flyers, and spending whole days in different neighbourhoods promoting individual events, because the community around each market is different, and she refuses to treat them as if they were the same.

Here in Halifax, she is rebuilding something she already knows how to build. The city knows her face. The trust will follow.