Rick Cohen On Social Enterprise Creating Lifelong Employment Pathways For Vulnerable Australians

Rick Cohen is a social entrepreneur who believes we can use food to make the world a better place.

Having worked across the hospitality industry, including his family’s acclaimed restaurant Casa Brusada north Venice, Rick has developed the skills and knowledge on what makes a successful food business. Having grown up experiencing family violence, sexual assault and serious mental health issues, Rick spend a lot of his young adulthood in psychiatric care.

It was in these years, and in his darkest moments Rick vowed to use his life for good and therein galvanised his path towards an everlasting passion to support vulnerable and marginalised people through food and social enterprise. Rick is a passionate advocate for mental health issues. In speaking to key stakeholders and across government, business and community organisations, Rick uses his lived-experience to both inform his social entrepreneurship and to advocate for positive changes in our community.

Rick is the inspiration behind and founder of Worthy Cause, a charity and social enterprise that changes the lives of vulnerable people through a six month paid training program in the charity’s cookie manufacturing kitchen and social enterprise cafes. By employing vulnerable people who have suffered from similar afflictions as himself, Rick is able to create positive impact for people who deserve a better life.

Rick discusses his lived experience overcoming severe mental health challenges, how this shaped the creation of a hospitality-based employment social enterprise, and why patience, empathy, and sustainability are essential to lasting social impact.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to your journey in social entrepreneurship?

[Rick Cohen] - Growing up, I never would’ve thought that my life would take me down this path, or that I’d end up in the privileged position of founding a charity and living a life in service of other people. On paper, I went to an amazing private school here in Melbourne. I had a mum and a dad, a brother and a sister. I had all the resources anyone would ever need to thrive in life.

What you wouldn’t have seen behind the scenes were the issues I was having with sexual violence and family violence. I developed PTSD and depression—chemical, state-of-the-art depression—from about the age of twelve. Year six in primary school was the first time I recognised I actually felt a little bit sadder than everybody else.

That all culminated in me going on to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics at ANU. I moved to Canberra to get away from life, to hide and run away, and what I ended up accidentally doing was removing myself from any support structure I had at home with my family and friends.

I collapsed into full psychiatric meltdown mode. I was very suicidal and no longer interested in living. I really had no interest in making it through.

I was put into psychiatric care, initially as someone who was involuntarily committed. Little-known fact: there’s a little prison inside every hospital, and that’s where they put people who are more disruptive than regular patients. From there, I went into psychiatric care in Canberra—private care, I should say—and that was my first exposure to exactly the kind of person our charity now serves.

Eventually, I moved back to Melbourne and moved back in with my mum. I got on the right medication and found the right doctor who could actually diagnose me with the right disorders. I then spent the next two and a half years in dialectical behavioural therapy.

I was doing six therapy sessions a week. I was, by true definition, a full-time patient, and I worked very hard on myself to be able to look and feel like what you see or hear right now. That’s what it came down to. In those moments, I had resolved that I would never be happy, and that I would never feel enjoyment in life.

I actually read in my journal just a couple of weeks ago, going through it again, that I had decided I would live life for other people, but never for myself. That wasn’t supposed to be a selfless act. It was because I was scared of dying, but also because I didn’t want to hurt my mum, my brother, and my sister.

I had initially resolved if I was ever going to keep living, it would only be for them and never for myself. I wouldn’t do it to hurt them because I’d seen people die in hospital. I’d seen people around me who had committed suicide, and I saw how it tore families and friends apart. Those people would never be the same again.

Initially, I told myself I was just going to have to live like this until I died naturally. And, lo and behold, I actually ended up starting a charity based on the same premise—that helping other people was for the service of others, not for myself.

But actually, living that way and choosing a life of service and acts of kindness to other people allowed me to feel and find happiness, fulfilment, and purpose in a way I genuinely never thought was possible for me.

I am probably, sincerely, one of the happiest people I know. I don’t have any friends who are as fulfilled in their careers as I am—not that I’m discouraging them—but I feel insanely lucky and privileged to do what I do.

All the different episodes I’ve been through, and the lives I’ve lived working in food photography, facilities management, marketing, entrepreneurship, and chefing in Italy, Canberra, and Melbourne—learning from other people’s mistakes and getting pans thrown at me, you pick up all these little things along the way.

I never would’ve thought that working in marketing at a facilities management company would help me understand how to run a café, but a lot of setting up a café is facilities management and project management.

It’s understanding what kind of flooring needs to go in a café, where power points should be, learning what a 15-amp outlet looks like compared to a 10-amp outlet. You don’t learn that if you haven’t worked in facilities management—you just happen across it.

I’ve been guided to this point in my life, and I will get to spend the rest of ever doing this because I’ve got that experience behind me—all these very different and interesting experiences that have brought me on this journey.

As the founder of Worthy Cause, can you please share more about this organisation and how it’s supporting vulnerable and marginalised people in communities?

Worthy Cause is a charity I founded in 2021, and our purpose is to support, empower, and change the lives of vulnerable people who can’t access employment. We offer a six-month paid employment training program through our cookie manufacturing initiative and our two cafés located at Melbourne Polytechnic Preston and Melbourne Polytechnic Heidelberg West.

Participants receive wraparound support, including financial literacy training, emotional counselling, job readiness training, and skills development sessions. We also help them transition into traditional, mainstream employment.

The reason we exist is because people who have overcome or endured incredibly difficult times—whether that’s mental health challenges like I’ve experienced, or family and domestic violence, drug dependency, exposure to the prison system, or physical health issues—face significant barriers. These are just examples, but essentially, if you've lived through hardship, you're often unable to work or even get work-ready.

You can’t go to free TAFE if you’re unable to leave the house because of an abusive partner, or if you're too depressed to complete your university course modules.

Without the ability to gain skills and experience, people lack those very things—and traditional employers will overlook them. The social and support services available to people in these situations often lack the resources to truly help them become employable.

There are programs like Job Seeker, where people are paid to apply for jobs, but they don’t teach you how to actually apply for a job, what jobs to apply for, or how to do the job once you accidentally get one. You could end up applying for 300 jobs to meet your quota, and maybe eventually someone says, “we’ll take a chance on you.”

But when you arrive at work—maybe at a café—if they say, “you’re on the coffee machine today,” you don’t know how to do that.

“Can you work the register?” You don’t know how to count coins.

“Can you wash dishes?” You don’t know which soap to use.

Is that person going to find and maintain meaningful or sustainable employment? Probably not.

Quite frankly, the research supports this. Recent figures show employment retention rates are very low for people on Job Seeker, and at the same time, low and entry-level jobs are growing disproportionately slower than the rest of the job market.

There are (I think) around 550,000 people who are unemployed and receiving Job Seeker benefits. Almost half of them have been unemployed for over five years, and only about 10% of them will go on to find and maintain employment.

The problem we’re solving is that there are people who are, quite frankly, desperate for work—who want to learn skills and gain experience—but are being unwillingly held down or held back because they simply can’t access the resources necessary to become employed.

Worthy Cause exists to be that one opportunity, that inflection point, that intermediary space—allowing people to gain the skills, experience, and award-rate income they need to move from being unemployable to employable.

Six months with us, and ideally, for the rest of their life they are employable. That’s the kind of person our program is built to support.

What role has your lived experience played in shaping the mission and operations of Worthy Cause, and how do you channel this into your leadership to help you passionately create change with this organisation?

I think at the highest tier of leadership, lived experience is critical to our success and growth. When you look at other charities or programs, having at least one person with actual lived experience—someone who can genuinely call themselves a beneficiary of that type of charity work—is important.

I’d say that everything we do at Worthy Cause has to pass my vibe check. If something doesn’t sit right with me, then it doesn’t sit right with Worthy Cause. That’s how we’ve built our mission, vision, and values—at an intuitive level.

We’ve definitely turned down opportunities that may have looked good on paper but would have compromised the integrity of the program. On a micro level, if something doesn’t feel right to me, then it doesn’t feel right for Worthy Cause.

At the participant level—I personally interview all the participants who come into our program—the very first thing I like to do when I sit down with someone is to share a little bit about my story. That’s not meant to be an ego trip; it’s a way to show that, at some level, we share an experience.

It’s a way to build trust. Whether our paths are identical or they just resonate with part of my experience, it lets them know that I truly understand and can empathise with how they feel.

Shared understanding helps us build trust with someone who may have been heavily institutionalised, or who has applied for hundreds of jobs and been rejected again and again. It would be incredibly demoralising to be interviewed by someone who lacks sympathy or understanding of what’s brought them to that point in their life. Sharing my story becomes a great icebreaker.

On the flip side, at the highest level of decision-making, I use my lived experience as a compass to guide and shape the program. It helps us make decisions, turn down opportunities that don’t align, or find new ones that do—always through the lens of how it will impact our program and our participants.

Ultimately, we all exist—my board, our paid employees, and our volunteers—to serve these participants. That mindset helps ensure the program is always participant-first. Of course, there are times we have to balance commercial revenue with program needs, and it can feel like the ends of a very wide spectrum.

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As a social enterprise, we do depend on commercial revenue, so it’s important to strike that balance between sustainable financial modelling and maximising the impact and depth of our program. It’s about making sure that every single person who comes through has their experience truly maximised.

When you’re providing training specifically for people with complex life experiences, are there any unique challenges or opportunities that arise?

The first challenge is we run two cafés and a cookie manufacturing business that only employs people who have no idea what they’re doing! That’s intentional, because we’re deliberately providing opportunities to people who haven’t had them before.

At the same time, it means we need to have a very high level of training, patience, and empathy for our participants. That goes for everyone—our volunteers, chefs, myself, the board—everyone involved.

You’re not allowed to get upset at a participant for burning a batch of cookies. It might cost us hundreds, even thousands of dollars. There have been mistakes that have cost us a lot of money, but that’s because they’re trying something new.

They’re allowed to make mistakes. They’re allowed to ask questions. They’re allowed to waste product when that’s part of the learning process—because if they’re not doing those things, they’re not learning. And learning is the whole point. Balancing commercial revenue and social impact can be a real challenge.

It’s a seesaw—we’re either spending money on impact, or saving money for a rainy day. There’s always a kind of equilibrium you have to find to ensure what we’re doing is sustainable, so that tomorrow we still have enough money to support our participants. We promise them a six-month program, and we’re not going to get three months in and say, “We can’t afford your wages anymore, so off you go.” We’ve never done that, and we never will.

On the opportunity side, we’ve built an incredible program that takes people who can’t even look you in the eye—because they’re shy, timid, scared, and anxious—and transforms them into confident, proud, loyal, and hardworking employees who give 100% every day. Every single participant represents an opportunity to deliver a lifetime of benefit.

It’s a six-month program, but when they leave us, they go on to work somewhere else. Then they become full-time employees. Their kids eat a little better at home.

Maybe their kids go to a better school. Maybe their kids go to university. In one or two generations, we’ve taken someone from a very low socioeconomic background to, ideally, a self-sufficient, healthy, happy family of higher income. That’s the power of what we’re doing.

What we see as a six-month program really needs to be measured over the lifetime of someone. We can’t quite track that yet because we’ve only been running for three years, but in twenty years’ time, I want to find those original participants and bring them in and ask, “Where are you now?”

Hopefully, we’ll be able to see that the lifetime value of this program has given them the opportunity to live a much better life—and that their dependants or their community have also benefited, even anecdotally.

I guess what we’re doing is innovating. We run cafés and bake cookies. A recipe—some American woman invented the chocolate chip cookie in, I don’t know, 15-something or other. It hasn’t changed. We’re not changing the recipe, we don’t want to change the recipe, and we’re not going to invent a new way to make cookies. What we are going to do is take a very universal, well-loved product and turn it into something that can do good.

There’s no cookie in the world—or at least in Australia, or let’s just play it safe and say Melbourne—that does what we do. There’s no cookie that can provide life-changing outcomes when you bite into it. That’s novel, exciting, and different. That’s an opportunity.

Working with the companies we do—Melbourne Polytechnic, ONA Coffee, Alsco, Aspen Legal, and others—these are organisations that either approached us or that we reached out to, and they’ve said, “What you do is important. Your mission, vision, and values align with what we want to support and be proud to partner with. Can we help you grow this program? Can we help you help more people?”

That’s not something a traditional business can do. When traditional businesses partner, you often just see two profit-driven entities trying to maximise income in the shortest amount of time. But when charities work together—or when charities partner with businesses—there’s a shared consensus that the mission, the program, and the values are important.

That impact is jointly recognised. And you don’t get that when you’re not working in social enterprise.

What advice would you give to an emerging social entrepreneur, or even someone who's been doing it for a while and wants to create a business or lead their current purpose-led organisation more effectively?

Whether you’re just starting out, a bit more established, or someone who’s been doing this a lot longer than I have, those absolute low points can make it really challenging to remember the purpose of what you’re doing.

You can spend days, weeks, and months buried in spreadsheets, thinking about cost of goods, tiny margins, and sitting with your accountant going through every little detail—“you can save $20 doing this,” or “$30 a month doing that.”

Having the capacity—or giving yourself the capacity—to sit back, take that eagle-eye view of your organisation, and remember the purpose you’re heading towards is critical. I’d say at least once a week, I look at our values, mission, and impact statement and think about how we’re aligning with and measuring up against them.

I’m very fortunate that our charity can afford to have a managing director. As a founder, that’s a game-changer. Like I mentioned earlier with the “vibe check” stuff, it gives me the capacity to step away from direct reports and operational challenges in the café.

I don’t need to think about whether we’ve got enough milk for tomorrow or if the carrots didn’t get delivered. Instead, I get to think about how that milk is being used, or whether those carrots are being cut up for the intended purpose—advancing people with complex barriers to employment.

Giving yourself the space to reflect, or finding the capacity to do so, or even just remembering that you can do that, is going to be critical. Whether you're running a day-one charity or have been in this space for thirty or forty years, that perspective matters.

I’ve seen people who have been doing this work for a long time. I wouldn’t say the light has gone out in their eyes, but they’ve definitely forgotten that what they do changes people’s lives.

They start to see it as a business, as profit. They spend too much time looking at a balance sheet and not enough time with the beneficiaries of their programs. When that happens, it becomes harder to connect to your purpose.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive change?

Definitely—and I’m going to segue into that by mentioning what I’m wearing right now, which is a jumper made by HoMie, a Melbourne-based charity that produces amazing streetwear and clothing. They employ and educate young people experiencing homelessness. One of their founders, Nick, was actually one of the very first people I ever reached out to when I was starting Worthy Cause.

I’d like to circle back to the last question and add some advice for people just starting out: reach out to the people in the charity space that you hope to one day call your peers. Charities aren’t in competition. Charity founders and people with the capacity to give are often very willing to share their industry secrets and advice. Reach out to me—my email is rick@worthycause.org.au. You can ask me any questions. I have no secrets.

HoMie is an incredible charity. Just last week, I also visited All Things Equal in Balaclava, also in Melbourne. Jess, their CEO, and Bianca, their General Manager, are doing fantastic work providing employment pathways for people with disabilities and neurodivergence. They’ve created a wonderful offering at their café in Balaclava—and the coffee is great too!

If you’re in Melbourne, definitely check out HoMie in Brunswick and All Things Equal in Balaclava.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our audience?

It would be rude not to mention the 500-and-something episodes of this podcast that have come out! Do your homework—if you want to learn how to run a charity, listen to the 600 hours of content you have here for free.

Beyond that, my favourite book—though it might sound like the most boring answer—is The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. He’s an economist, and the book explores consumer behaviour and how, often, less is more. It explains how limiting choices can actually lead to greater participation.

I think, to some extent, this book inspired how we run our charity too. We have a fairly dense menu, and our program is structured in a way that limits options in some areas but maximises engagement and participation.

If you're interested in hospitality or have watched the show The Bear, I’d also recommend Will Guidara’s book Unreasonable Hospitality. A lot of his life story has been woven into the show—he’s actually a producer on it—but the book is packed with leadership lessons from his time as one of the world’s top restaurateurs and hospitality managers.