Benjamin’s Heart Designs is a collection of beautiful and helpful planners and products.

I’m raising the funds to be able to reproduce my designs in various ways, including printing the main product, which will be a small range of combination planners – Life Planners that act as an all-in-one companion book for organising and inspiring your life. The shop will also include gift items such as calendars, journals, stickers, art prints, art books and tee shirts.

The Combination Planners are designed with women in mind. Often women, especially mothers, carry an enormous mental burden of organisation. Mothers organise the lives of their families, which is not a single task, it’s a combination of many aspects of multiple lives all coming together to function as a whole. In my case, it’s better described as a constant flurry of confusion, and I struggle daily to organise my thoughts, my physical space, my competing tasks and mounting pressures.

I have relied on journals, life planners, lists and visual art diaries my whole life, but when I became a mother of 2 kids, my workload and mental burden quadroupled! In my flurry and mess I was writing things down that I needed to remember, but then I was saying ‘I wrote this down but where did I write it?’ There’s lists, pieces of paper, journals, notebooks, and apps on my smartphone that I could look for it on. I couldn’t hold onto anything in my mind, or on paper anymore! Nothing was working for me! There wasn’t a planner on the market that could cater to me, and I’ve tried out heaps! So I started to create my own – one that combines all the aspects of my life and can be found in one book.

One book that holds the organisation of the life of my family, and hold space for both sequential organisation and creative influence. 

The product I will be creating is a large hardcover planner. The base version has has spreads for yearly, monthly, weekly and daily organisation, but it is all undated so that you can plan from July to June if you wish! You can start at any time. It has shopping lists, priority lists, gift planners, budgets, cleaning notes, food preparation notes, meal planners, medical appointment notes, and free space for creating lists of your own. It has a small number of easy to prepare recipes, space for your favourite recipes, and a guide for grocery shopping on a tight budget. It has kid’s lists and lists of important life things that busy people sometimes forget to remember, such as keeping a log of car services, your monthly financial commitments, reminders for breast and dental checks etc. The ultimate aim of this planner is to be your brain’s visual thinking space. 

My plan is that the book will lay flat on your table and will have tabs for finding information easily. It will be made of sturdy but recycled paper.

Initially my shop will launch two combination planners, one after the other:

1. Life Planner + Bible Companion. This planner will have all of the base elements, but will also include tools for helping your family grow in the love of God. It will include a Bible Reading Plan, a list of verses for your family to read and learn together, daily verses, space for Bible study notes, prayer journal, sermon notes, inspiration and learning.
2. Life Planner + Medical Companion. This planner will have all of the base elements, but will also include tools for navigating the NDIS (Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme) and the Therapy and Medical aspects of your life. It will include space for you to detail your NDIS plan and budget, goals, therapist contact list, medical contact list, a helpful list of resources, space for you to detail your own resources, money spent from plan, receipts and where to find more details.

My aim is to broaden the range of planners available, and to eventually offer a customisable approach so that you can choose which elements to keep and which elements to drop. I have business women, artists and gardeners in mind to also create for.

The planner will contain beautiful images, photographs, artwork, designs and words. It will be colourful, sunny and elegant. It will be something that you can gain inspiration from, but that you should not feel guilty to mess up!  Life is messy. It’s chaotic and you should feel free to scrawl the chaotic thoughts into your planner without fear of devaluing it. The planner’s value is that it is a companion and helper, but I also want it to provide beauty in your daily life!

How did Benjamin’s Heart Designs begin?

The concept of Benjamin’s Heart Designs originated in my mind in 2019 when my son Benjamin was 18 months old and we needed to quickly raise thousands of dollars for vital feeding therapy to wean him off of a nasal-gastric feeding tube that he’d become dependent on since birth. Benjamin is a Heart Warrior; he had open heart surgery at 3 months old to fix holes in his heart.

In 2019 I set up a temporary shop with similar products, and we were easily able to raise the thousands, and then some! Benjamin received feeding therapy and came off of his feeding tube, and we were encouraged to donate the excess of $5,000 to other people in need. We did this, and the outcome was a real blessing for everyone involved. Our lives were changed by Benjamin becoming an eater, and the lives of another family were changed through the donation.

I have wanted to keep my shop going since then. But, since then I have become a better artist and have decided what I want to focus on. In deciding that I wanted to open a shop and start creating again, I felt the same need to also be a blessing to others in everything I do. This time in a smaller way, with a small percentage of profits being donated to causes that are close to our hearts, such as HeartKids Australia, and various organisations working with families of disability.

Why would you care about my project?

My combination planners will be a foot in the door for me to return to being a financial help for my family, and in that same vain, I wish to help other mums who are experiencing the personal limitations of motherhood. In the newness of motherhood you find you are never the same again; most notably your brain and mind have changed. Not only is everything a little harder to remember and organise, but you are constantly being interrupted and having to put yourself last. You lose a lot of your identity, and for mothers like myself who are raising a child with a disability and medical condition, your life has changed beyond the limits of what you imagined it would. It’s all a bit much, but it does get easier, I aim to help out with that process through my planners, not only providing clear directional planning, but also inspiration to remind you that life is still beautiful even when you’re in the ‘trenches’ of early motherhood.

I will be making my planners as cost-effectively as possible.

How do I plan on making it happen?

I have been researching printing companies for the past three months and have decided on a company in Melbourne. I have the software needed and I am almost finished designing the first planner. I just need a couple of items that will allow for business setup and the continuation of creativity. It will also fund the first round of purchasing the books. I plan on working on this project in my non-family time and have given myself a generous project length so that I can complete the project within the limits of normal family life. Rewards for backers will be available before the Planner itself will be available, but I expect it to come together easily.

The funding I am seeking will be used this way:

-purchase an Apple pencil to hasten document and image creation on the ipad

-six months of website hosting to get my products further out into the online world

-production and purchase of the first run of planners.