How our story began

Every time we tell a story, we make a decision about when and where to begin it. We draw connections across time for our audience and craft a story that helps them visualize and experience what happened. While Confianza Collective launched in March 2025, I wanted to write this blog post about how our story began three years ago with a project called Cuentos de Confianza: A Community Writing Project for Reproductive Justice.

Cuentos de Confianza is a bilingual website and storytelling project that highlights stories written by 13 Latina health promoters and community-engaged professionals about their lived experiences and community work on the path toward reproductive justice. These cuentos highlight stories of strength, confidence, and perseverance as the authors share experiences that reflect a range of issues taken up by the reproductive justice movement: maternal mental health, infertility, immigration, gender roles, parenting, domestic violence, and more. They have been used in community programming to facilitate conversations about these and other issues across Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, and Perú.

The project began as a collaboration among the founder of the promotores de salud program at Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin (PPWI), Maria Barker, the website designer and editor, Dr. Danielle Koepke, the first cohort of writers, and me. At the time, I was an associate professor of rhetoric and writing studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Thanks to the support of PPWI and a Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society grant, I taught a community writing class for a group of promotores de salud. The promotores and I spent months talking through possibilities for sharing the stories they wanted to develop and decided on a bilingual website that could be shared easily and integrated into their community programming. With the support of UWM’s Office of Undergraduate Research, three amazing students, Juan Arevalo, Alejandra González, and Raquel Quevedo, helped us translate all the stories into English and develop the website to reflect a bilingual reality with a preference for Spanish. The first cohort of writers published their stories in 2022 and the second cohort published their stories in 2024.

I had the honor of working one-on-one with all 13 writers as they navigated the process of crafting their stories. It was unlike any writing class I had taught before. It was an intense, emotional, and extremely rewarding. As the promotores integrated the stories into their programming, we heard time and again about the positive impact they were having and how they helped open up conversations about issues people often struggle to discuss.

I began learning about confianza from the promotores in 2019 when I started a qualitative research project with them. Through that research and Cuentos, I came to understand confianza as integral to both community health and story work.

My hope is that the project can continue to grow in its creativity and impact as we move forward. The Cuentos project has always been a community-driven collaboration, and we’re trying to proceed with care as the promotores, communities, and issues the project engages all face increased levels of stress and injustice in the world today. With the support of two Cuentos writers who will serve as advisors for Confianza Collective, Elida and Rocio, we will spend summer 2025 figuring out the next chapter of Cuentos and how to continue supporting it as a storywork studio committed to reproductive and immigrant justice.

There is more to the story, of course, but for now that’s a bit about how our story began.

Cuentos de Confianza logo

This logo was designed for Cuentos de Confianza by Ricardo Roderick-Cornejo with the support of a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies.