Meet the Coach: An Interview with Rachel at Confianza Collective
If you can tell a story well, you can move people to do something - Soledad O'Brien
Storytelling is not a new practice. People have been telling stories long before social media and marketing campaigns capitalized on it. Storytelling has played an important role in social movements, community unification, and cultural preservation. Stories are how we get to know each other and how we explain what we know (or don’t know) about the world.
Everyone has a story to tell. But sometimes storytellers need some extra help with telling their story in a way that can connect with and impact others. As such, we want to share how Confianza Collective approaches storywork and coaching through a conversation with the studio’s director, Rachel.
Danielle: As we get started, Rachel, can you tell readers what Confianza Collective is?
Rachel: Confianza Collective is a virtual and bilingual (English-Spanish) storywork studio based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We offer coaching and consulting services for community-engaged organizations, businesses, and research teams. We help clients advance their mission, increase visibility, and attract funding through impactful storytelling.
We support people in the development of and practice of telling stories that they want to share to advocate for specific causes, describe experiences with organizations, and make an impact on others. We can also help people take stories they have written and tailor them for different audiences and timeframes. We call this “storywork.”
Confianza Collective logo.
Danielle: Storywork is a great way to describe that process. How do storytellers benefit from working with a coach?
Rachel: Storytellers can gain a lot from working with a coach. The one-on-one support can help them build confidence in presenting to a large audience and it can help them organize their thoughts and refine the way they tell their story so it makes an impact without oversharing or going over time. When event organizers ask people to share stories as part of a larger program, they don’t often have the time to check in and help the storytellers with preparing their presentations. That’s where I come in as a coach who can give that individualized attention while keeping the event goals and storyteller’s agency and needs in mind. A lot of my work entails listening, taking notes, and helping people identify what the key details are that they want to share, and then practicing telling their story when they feel it’s almost ready.
Rachel sits at a table listening to a woman talk with her hands on a notebook.
Danielle: You mention on your website that your approach is trauma-informed. What does that mean?
Rachel: My approach to coaching takes a trauma-informed approach that is shaped by my understanding of trauma-informed care and how that relates to storytelling. The Buffalo Center for Social Research explains, “Trauma-Informed Care understands and considers the pervasive nature of trauma and promotes environments of healing and recovery rather than practices and services that may inadvertently re-traumatize.” So what that means is that I enter any new work with people and their stories by recognizing how they may have experienced some sort of trauma in their life and that the storytelling they are asked to do in support of community-engaged programs or advocacy work may be inviting them to reflect on memories of traumatic events and how they survived or worked through them. As a storytelling coach, I often hear more details about people’s experiences than ever end up in their final draft for the event or project. It’s important to recognize that those experiences of reflecting on the past and figuring out what to share or not can be a challenging process that should include some sort of support along the way.
Too often people are asked to share their stories to help advocate for causes or support organizations without consideration for how they might relive difficult moments in their lives. For people wanting to share stories, they might think they need to share personal details to make an “impact” on others. But the truth is, you can make quite an impact by just giving a general description of something that happened and incorporating other details that help people get to know you and your journey from then until today.
Danielle: Definitely. A storyteller can impact people without disclosing all the painful or traumatic details of their experience.
Rachel. Yes. For instance, I was recently working with a promotora de salud (health promoter) who had experienced domestic violence and wanted to share her story to help inspire others to seek help if they needed it. Her courage and strength was something I hoped would come through in the story. So, we met multiple times to talk through different parts of her story and what she ultimately wanted to include. While she shared many details with me about the abusive relationship, her story ended up having only a couple sentences that discussed the relationship in general and the day that led to her finally seeking help and getting out of the situation. In the end, that promotora’s story had much more to say about her journey as a mother, the community resources that helped her heal, and the ways she has helped others as a promotora who understands the challenges many women face in her community.
I always offer choices for ways to develop or revise a story, I encourage people to be mindful and cautious with naming or describing other people, and I listen and give feedback in ways that affirm their experiences and stay focused on their goals for the message they want to get across. I try to create a safe and caring environment so that storytellers feel supported in figuring out how to tell their story, but that they ultimately are the ones deciding if and what they want to share.
Danielle: I can see how a trauma-informed approach allows for thoughtful responses and support to storytellers who have meaningful but vulnerable stories to share. It seems fitting to ask you about “Confianza” next. Why is that such a central part of the studio’s name and vision?
Rachel: Confianza can be translated to trust or confidence. It’s at the heart of successful community health work and storytelling. I’ve learned a lot about confianza being in collaborations with a group of wonderful promotores de salud who work across Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, and Peru. They are experts at creating confianza and can identify when they’ve “entered into” confianza with another person or group. It’s a concept that is multidimensional in the ways it emphasizes mutual respect, safety, care, confidence, and trust. What began as a qualitative study about promotores’ communication practices between institutions and communities evolved into a deeper relationship, a community writing project, and a desire to focus my work more on storytelling and community engagement.
When I set out to create a storywork studio that would have a focus on supporting clients in healthcare and community organizations, I knew it had to center confianza. It was also at the heart of our community writing project, Cuentos de Confianza, which I share more about here. Not only do we focus on supporting organizations that are dedicated to building and maintaining trust with communities, but storytellers also must develop confidence in themselves and trust in others to be willing to share their stories. I decided to call it a Confianza Collective because I hope that it can grow in the coming years to create safe and trusting spaces for people to work on stories together and that I can grow a small team of story coaches who understand confianza on a deeper level that’s rooted in community and culture.
Rachel smiles while talking to Elida and Raquel from the Confianza Collective team.
Danielle: This idea of prioritizing confianza for the studio makes me wonder: How is language tied up in the work you do or have done in the past?
Rachel: I’ve been interested in Spanish and translation since kindergarten when I was determined to learn how to communicate with another classmate who only spoke Spanish. I am not Latina, but I have a deep respect for, and interest, in Latin American culture, the varieties of Spanish spoken in the world, and translation practices that prioritize how communities communicate. I also have extensive experience engaging with comunidades latinas through community health programs, research, and storytelling.
As a person with Italian, German, and French ancestral roots but no connection to those languages, I think it’s so important to encourage diverse cultural and linguistic practices across generations for immigrant families. I’m only in the third generation since part of my family immigrated to the U.S. from Italy, but pressure to assimilate made it so I have little to no connection to how my grandfather’s parents and family communicated.
I studied Spanish from junior high through college and then studied abroad in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic where I stayed with host families and learned so much through sitting with people and listening to their stories over cafecitos (cups of coffee). I helped interpret for students and health professionals with a summer health program in the D.R. and I worked closely with community health leaders in two towns to run temporary medical and dental clinics with visiting practitioners and local volunteers. After moving to Wisconsin in 2017, I continued to explore language and community health with promotores de salud working in reproductive and sexual health education.
Danielle: Speaking of community health, what does “community-engaged” mean to you?
Rachel: I’d define community-engaged as something that actively works to build relationships and trust with community members while emphasizing their importance in the long-term outcomes of any given project or initiative. Community can mean a lot of different things to people and all of us belong to various communities depending on where we live, how we identify, what we do for work, if we’re parents or not, and more. Community engagement is important because I believe it is essential to finding better solutions toward a healthier and more just future. That’s why I think people who work in between organizations and communities are such important leaders to listen to and learn from…because they get it when there is a lack of trust or a disconnect in communication. They know what needs to be done, but too often they aren’t the ones making the decisions, getting the calls for funding, or getting paid equitably to lead the way forward.
The best community-engaged work is not complex…it focuses on making time and space for relationship and trust building, community input and decision making, and ongoing check-ins to take a pulse on progress with the collective’s goals and interests in mind.
Danielle: I appreciate that distillation down to community at the heart of things to wrap us up here. Thanks for sharing, Rachel.
For readers looking to find out more about Confianza Collective or connect with a team member, follow the links below:
At Confianza Collective, we believe that stories are sacred, embodied, and powerful. We also believe that stories and storytellers should be cared for—not commodified. Please reach out to us if you are an organization or an individual looking for support in how best to utilize storytelling as a way to inspire or impact others. And, stay tuned for our next few blog posts on topics including tips for writing your story, internet safety, storytelling for advocacy, and more.