Projects and collaborations by Rick Benger

A selection of my projects and soulworks.

Liminal Learning

Liminal Learning offers a collective launch into a purposeful adulthood. We’re building an education model and community scaffolding that gives young people (~18-24) a way to find their way.

Life happens at the edges — in threshold moments, relations, and contexts. These liminal spaces are where the greatest potential for transformation lies. In particular, we aim to help young people navigate the thresholds between youth and adulthood, between self and other/collective, and between old and new societal sources of meaning (recognising the current upheaval and phase shift, often coined ‘the meaning crisis’.)

Once upon a Pancake

Once upon a Pancake books help kids fall in love with reading and writing. The stories inside aren’t finished… it’s up to you and your kids to imagine what happens next.

I recently partnered with HarperCollins. You can now find the books in bookstores in Canada and the US, and online via Amazon and other retailers.

I started this project with a successful Kickstarter which funded the coffee table book (for grown-ups.) The series for kids and parents was always the intended apogee, though. I wanted to evoke kids’ creativity and narrative imagination, while also supporting reading, writing, and comprehension skills. Make something that connected grown-ups and kids in attuned and heartfelt play.

I’m grateful. I hear from parents about the story rituals they’ve created. From teachers of students with disabilities who’ve had breakthroughs. I get emails like this:

I realised a soulwork, from mind-glimpse to idea to a medium-sized DTC business. Now I’m working with HarperCollins on expanding the series.

Medley Foundation

Medley Foundation was third place and curiosity lab in Berlin.

It was a grand and heartfelt experiment in Gathering and Place — here, from an essay I wrote in The Medley Mirror:

Gathering is the art and practice of combining people and setting. It doesn't require particular properties of scale or time; it can be two people for an afternoon picnic, or a decades-long gathering of mothers in political protest, or an every-Sunday game of pick-up. The art comes in the constraints, rituals, curation of people, and setting-design…

… Place is created by “people like us doing things like this”, in this setting, again and again. When a coherent-enough group ritualises a way of gathering in a particular setting, the setting itself is made sacred; it is imbued with the feel, the ritual, the intention and meaning, and thus becomes a relational component supporting the gathering. Place benefits from consistency, longevity, (semi-)permanence, repetition, lore. Place is an agent; the walls speak, the carpets host.

While Medley couldn’t be supported in that format and constellation, it was a remarkably beautiful collision. A talisman and herald for this “beautiful re-bundling”, this social and collective re-attunement that I bang on about.

Bloom Collective

Bloom Collective is a squad. A crew, a collective, a guild, a potpourri of internet friends who met IRL for the first time in August 2021, and have since deepened friendships, conspired in works, and broken many genres of bread. Brothers and sisters in the possibility of art and life.

Bloom is both a radical joy in my life and a philosophical hunch — that the neglected and fruitful path to a meaningful life is “together in practice”. Offline with our bodyminds, atomic, in small groups, in ritual and friction and consequences. Between individual self-knowledge and self-reliance and Global Development Goals, there is the fertile and necessary soil of thousands of community gardens, co-ops, garage sales, and culs-de-sac closed for a Sunday science fair.

Laneway Learning

Laneway Learning turns cafés into classrooms. It supports amateur teachers to host fun, affordable classes in anything and everything, from Urban Beekeeping to Film Noir to How to Beat Your Friends at Monopoly. I threaded some photos here.

My friends Tom and Kim, along with Mark and Lucie, started Laneway Learning in Melbourne. I visited them all and loved what they were brewing, and I proposed that I start a Sydney chapter.

I wanted to galvanise a community in which learning was for its own sake — which understood and celebrated McLuhan’s sentiment, “anyone who makes a distinction between entertainment and education doesn't know the first thing about either.” Salon-inspired, relational learning in a place with attractive lighting and tea or wine, rather than lectures under flickering halogens in an austere palladium, in service of education for outcome’s sake, a credential or career advancement.

While I was involved, we put on 500+ classes and events in Sydney, with 300+ individual teachers, for 10,000+ students. It was a vital and wonderful community. And in Melbourne, it still is! 10+ years on and thriving.

Marketing

I’ve worked in most marketing disciplines, at most scales, in much of the world. As an individual contributor, I wrangle words to influence culture, decisions, and perception. I’m quite good at this. In teams, I’m typically the libero/lateralist, translating and harmonising the expertise and experience of cross-disciplinary teams. I’m good at this. I currently freelance with Superhuman.