Last updated: September 29, 2024

My name is George Patrick Richard Benson. I live in what we now call Vancouver, but I feel a deep connection to the lands and peoples across the entirety of the Salish Sea where I've largely lived for my entire life.

These kinds of biographies are hard; trying to balance what feels "personal" and "professional," when in fact the goal is to combine as much of both together as possible. Fundamentally, my work life is an intimate part of who I am because I do what I love – working for the public good – and because I do it in ways that I find captivating and joyful.

How I Learned to Define Myself

In 2019, I was at a series of crossroads in my life. I was changing jobs, I was struggling to balance a wide array of volunteer and community commitments, I had a relationship I was unsure of where it was headed, and I knew I was deep in burn-out.

I took some time, and upon the advice of great friends and deep thinkers on purposeful living – Veronica Bylicki, Alan Shapiro, Alyssa McDonald, among others – I took time to sit down and create a framework for how I could think deliberately about who I was, and where I wanted to go.

What resulted from that was a 13-page document I called How I Plan to Live a Good and Meaningful Life. It was my "personal plan" for the next three years. It was important for me to have something like this because I wanted to be clear, with some separation from the many other impinging forces and influences on me, on who I was, and what I, stood for, so that I could add and intermix that sense of self with others and the world in deliberate, generative ways.

The plan contained several key sections, but the most of important part was a personal mission statement:

Experience and serve the universe with curiosity, kindness, and righteousness.

It was simple, if maybe a little grandiose, but the framing, and the words, shape how I see myself – and the person I am always aspiring to be – all these years later.

Importantly, they also felt deeply true in retrospect, as well:

I've always been service-oriented, shaped by the philosophy of servant leadership from Robert Greenleaf, the Engaged Buddhism of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn, and my earliest experiences of working class parents who, with less explicit terminology, believed in and practiced solidarity in their community in innumerable ways.

I'm also profoundly curious and unable to accept simple explanations, an experience which I think is deeply shaped by my neurodivergence. I'm intellectually omnivorous and read as widely as possible, with an eagerness to understand how seemingly disparate things fit together, both to satisfy an inherent intellectual hunger, and to help improve the state of the world.

Lastly, and perhaps most confusing for others, I aspire toward a kind of righteousness. The word is a complex one, but through its Middle English, Hebrew, and Arabic associations with moral uprightness and charity, I think it contains a sense of striving to be good in the world through work, and - despite contemporary use to the contrary - to never take one's own moral position as a given.

It was through this process that I feel like I "arrived" at a way of knowing and seeing myself that feels contemporaneous, while also containing enough infinitives to help shape my aspirations of who I might one day grow into. If you stick around here long enough, I hope we might grow a little together.

A Brief Timeline of My Life

Inspired by Derek Sivers, here's a timeline of my life with some accomplishments I'm particularly proud of:

Elements of my Identity

  • I'm a Millennial, a "digital native," a child of the 1990s, a witness to 3 major economic crises (and counting), and have been shaped by our society's ever-increasing understanding of and concern about climate change.
  • I'm originally from Vancouver Island and will always consider myself an 'islander,' feeling a connection to the lands and the people that I've been surrounded by since birth.
  • I experience the world as a neurodivergent person, diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, but with a lifetime of other, related experiences, as well.
  • I'm trained as an urban planner, and, though I don't do work that's strictly related to that, I am profoundly interested in the places that humans live - big and small - and am always looking to understand, celebrate, and improve them.
  • My academic background is broad, but I have always felt most anchored in my time as a student of history and of the mechanics of power.
  • I'm the product of a long line of workers and peasants, stretching all the way back to my families' ancestral homes on the plains of Ukraine and Scottish isles, and elsewhere in Europe, and I'm proud of my working class upbringing and values.
  • I'm a Canadian, and even amidst the many painful complexities that come with that, I remain deeply grateful for how my culture has shaped me, and am stubbornly optimistic that our society can write its wrongs and chart a better future - maybe even one that can inspire places with similar histories to ours.
  • Though I come from a background heavily focused on policy, much of my thinking and work is now focused on the economy and the strange craft known as "economic development," which I think of as, broadly, the pursuit of greater human flourishing. I lead that portfolio at the Zero Emissions Innovation Centre.
  • I've always been fascinated by 'why' questions and have maintained a lifelong interest in philosophy, but I'm also deeply steeped in, and oriented toward, the pragmatism that is so common in North American thinking.
  • I've had the privilege to live in and travel in other countries, generally as part of my schooling and work - the seven months I spent living in Bangladesh in 2012 was one of the single most formative experiences of my life.
  • Though it can be hard to find the time to do it with my preferred intensity, I consider myself an outdoorsman and something of an amateur naturalist, and I love any excuse to get into the mountains of waters of where I live.