About
About Rick
Social entrepreneur, hospitality operator and mental health advocate. Founder of Worthy Cause. Melbourne-based, Italian heritage, Casa-Brusada-trained.
The short version
I'm Rick Cohen. Melbourne-based social entrepreneur, hospitality operator and mental health advocate. I founded Worthy Cause in 2021, a DGR1 registered charity and social enterprise that uses food, especially cookies made in Melbourne, to fund and deliver a six-month paid employment training program for people facing complex barriers to stable work.
I speak publicly about lived experience of severe trauma, family violence and a mental health collapse, and how that experience shaped a business model built on dignity, paid work and the principle that "failing is the only option."
Worthy Cause works. It also reaches about thirty people a year and costs a fortune to run. So I built Worthy Courses, an online employability platform for young Australians, to teach the skills that keep people in work to the thousands who will never get a place in a six-month program. Every paid course funds a free place for someone who needs it.
How I got here
I was born in 1995 and raised in Melbourne. My family heritage is Italian and our family restaurant is Casa Brusada, in Italy's north-east. I trained there before doing kitchen time in some of Melbourne's premier restaurants. I studied PPE at ANU, associated with Burgmann College, before a serious mental health collapse pulled me back to Melbourne for two years of full-time psychiatric care. I later completed a Business and Marketing degree while chefing.
Before any of that I was going to be a musician. I started guitar at four, played in the school quartet, was the youngest in the jazz club, and was certain a rockstar's life was the only one for me. By year 11 it had quietly stopped being the thing. I think about careers as a rocket ship launched into the unknown: the angle you set early shapes where you land, you can change course later but it gets harder the further you travel, and what matters most is finding work that feels worth doing along the way. Mine ran through restaurant kitchens, including weekends as a young chef at a Melbourne pizzeria, long before it ran to cookies.
Watching fellow patients cycle in and out of readiness for work, crying out for help and getting none, until they learned that "failing is the only option," became the founding insight for Worthy Cause. I made a decision at my lowest point to live a life of service. The cookies came from the love of food. The model came from the patients.
What Worthy Cause is, today
Founded in 2021 with $17,000 of personal capital. Today it is a DGR1 registered charity and social enterprise operating:
- Two New Grounds cafes on Melbourne Polytechnic campuses (Preston and Heidelberg West), on $1pa lease agreements, with ONA Coffee as roaster and a zero-food-waste commitment.
- A cookie manufacturing kitchen in Melbourne, capacity for 1,000 to 2,000 cookies a day, supplying online, monthly subscriptions, corporate gifting, bespoke corporate cookies, markets, wholesale and team-building workshops.
- A 26-week paid training program for people aged 18 to 30 facing complex barriers to work, with a three-hour kitchen trial in onboarding, individualised hours and pay above award. Referral partners include Workskil, WISE Employment and Mind Australia.
FY25 turnover is approximately $650,000. The operation runs on 12 FTE plus 12 or more regular volunteers. 20+ participants have come through the program since inception, with capacity for 15 at a time on a rolling basis.
How I think about it
I am, by my own description, the "accidental CEO" and "Head of Cookies". My decision filter is straightforward: everything we do at Worthy Cause has to pass my vibe check.
The brand essence I try to operate from: the compassionate operator: direct, human, mission-led and relentlessly practical. Participants are worthy of the program; many arrive saying someone else deserves the place more, and my job is to tell them they deserve it. The culture is forgiving: you are not allowed to get upset at a participant for burning a batch of cookies.
Influences I keep coming back to: Will Guidara's Unreasonable Hospitality and Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice. Peer enterprises I admire: HoMie (streetwear and homelessness) and All Things Equal (disability and neurodivergence in hospitality).
Proof it works
Tiffany Woolhouse joined us in 2024 after twenty years in and out of casual work. Kicked out of home at seventeen, she had been rejected from hundreds of jobs and arrived anxious and reserved. She did not just learn to make coffee. She built the confidence to hold a conversation, work longer shifts and back herself, and left us for full-time work. By the end, her only fault was turning up an hour early just to chat.
Getting a job was never her hardest problem. Keeping one was. That is the gap we close.
Where to next
Worthy Cause proved the model. The limit is reach: a six-month program changes one life at a time and costs around $18,000 a head. The skills that keep people in work, communication, interpersonal skills, financial literacy and above all confidence, are taught nowhere. Not in schools, not at home, not at university, not by employers. Worthy Courses is how I take those skills to scale: an online platform for young Australians, built so every paid course funds a free place for someone who needs it. The goal is simple. Get the job. Keep the job.