Recipes of Resilience is a community-led creative project bringing together poetry, food, visual art, storytelling, and shared making through participant-led Creative Cafés across Wolverhampton.

Inspired by Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, the project explored how a shared table can hold memory, identity, resilience, and lived experience. Working in collaboration with the 1 in 3 Poetry Community, Let’s Get Together Group, Wolverhampton City of Sanctuary, and the University of Wolverhampton, participants contributed stories, recipes, poems, objects, and artworks that became part of a large-scale immersive exhibition, documentary, and printed publication.

Across the Creative Cafés, individuals from diverse cultural and social backgrounds came together to share experiences through creativity, conversation, food, and collective making. The project created welcoming spaces where participants could engage at their own pace, building confidence, connection, and a sense of belonging through shared artistic practice.

The final exhibition brought together large-scale installation work, poetry, visual art, recipes, participant responses, and collaborative pieces developed throughout the project. Over 400 people attended the exhibition across multiple days, engaging with the work, sharing reflections, and contributing feedback through written forms, recorded interviews, and video responses.

Feedback collected throughout the project highlighted increased confidence, improved wellbeing, reduced isolation, and the importance of creating safe and inclusive creative spaces within the community. Many participants described the Creative Cafés as spaces that gave them something meaningful to look forward to, while others reflected on the value of being heard, supported, and connected with others through the process.

This publication documents the journey of the project, bringing together selected artworks, poems, recipes, stories, and reflections developed throughout Recipes of Resilience.