Sue Moffat, Director of New Vic Borderlines, Stoke-on-Trent, led an absorbing, testing and inspiring workshop using cultural animation techniques.  Equal Arts helped us pair up a group of older people engaged with their current cultural programme with a group of residents from a sheltered accommodation unit.  We took our older people for a visit to the Discovery Museum and then used the workshop to explore what resilience meant to our participants and how engagement with cultural interventions might, or might not, contribute to developing resilience.

Thanks to everyone for coming and contributing so much to our first workshop in the series.  Rose Gilroy shared her focus group research on co-housing, where rather than asking, ‘Where do we want to live?’, older people questioned, ‘how do we want to live?’.  Dr Gill Windle drew from her extensive experience researching the concept and shared some of the challenges associated with measurement.  A special warm thanks goes to Maureen McClarens, Muriel Williamson, Violet Sadler, Shirley Glass and Anne Gray who offered us their open and emotional accounts of what resilience means to them. In the afternoon, Sophia de Sousa from Glass-House Community-Led Design led a workshop with Dr Katerina Alexiou where we took on the role of different stakeholders and came up with some suggestions for redesigning a piece of communal space.

We are aiming to understand how creative interventions can help develop connectivity and resilience for older people. We will critically reflection on a range of projects including community gardening, filmmaking, the built environment, product design, digital media, theatre, music, cultural learning and visual arts interventions for those with early stage dementia. Juxtaposing different approaches will help develop innovative ways of thinking about resilience and propose solutions to issues raised by community partners.

Four seminars will be undertaken consisting of presentations, workshops, and breakout sessions. A group of older people will play a full part in the workshops and explore what connectivity and resilience means to them.