Cuentos de Confianza
This Cuentos de Confianza logo was designed by Ricardo Roderick-Cornejo
Cuentos de Confianza is a community writing project that creates space for promotores de salud to share their stories about working with sexual and reproductive health. It also is a space for reflecting on how their life experiences have impacted their understanding of reproductive justice. The Cuentos website was created to share the promotores’ stories with community members, other promotores, and people interested in advancing reproductive justice and Latine community health.
Cuentos de Confianza was co-founded by Rachel Bloom-Pojar, Maria Barker, and Danielle Koepke in partnership with the CCmáS promotores de salud at Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin (PPWI). It developed with the support of PPWI, a Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society grant, UW-Milwaukee’s (UWM) Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Office of Undergraduate Research, and the first two cohorts of writers.
What began as a virtual writing class for promotores de salud developed into a bilingual website and set of stories that could be integrated into community programming to facilitate conversations about a range of topics related to reproductive justice: maternal mental health, immigration, parenting, infertility, domestic violence, gender roles, and more. The 13 stories that are currently featured on the Cuentos website have been used in programming across Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, and Peru. We held graduation ceremonies for the writers in 2022 in Milwaukee and 2024 in Madison to celebrate the launch of each cohort’s set of stories. The Cuentos class is currently on a pause as we figure out what our next steps should be regarding needs and challenges for the promotores and their communities.
The project was a crucial partnership that helped Rachel identify a desire to work more directly with storytelling and community-engaged programs outside of academia. So when she left her faculty position at UWM in 2025, she knew Cuentos would be a key part of her future work but that it might evolve over time. The project continues on as a partnership between Confianza Collective and PPWI’s CCmáS program with key leadership and guidance from the Cuentos Advisors, Elida Rebolledo and Rocio Cornejo, who were writers for Cuentos in the first and second cohort. The Confianza Collective team will continue to manage the Cuentos website, provide translation services, and facilitate writing workshops in collaboration with CCmáS.
Stay tuned for more information on this project or reach out if your health promoter program has an interest in hosting a series of Cuentos workshops.
