A woman sits in a small room. Light catches dust through the window behind her. She’s talking about leaving her five-year-old home alone because there was no one else to watch him. Her voice is steady. Her hands move as she speaks, telling a different story.
The person across from her nods and takes notes. Maybe there’s a camera. Maybe just a recorder. The tools don’t matter. What matters is the distance they create.
The woman finishes. She looks down at her hands.
“Thank you,” the person says. “Your story is important.”
But she doesn’t get to decide how that story is told. She won’t choose what gets included, what stays hidden. The person with the tools is the person with the power.
The woman sits alone, hoping whoever tells her story tells it the way she would want.
Meet Sara Gómez
Sara Gómez is the founder of Stories for Collective Change and co-founder of The Understory, based in Tivoli, Italy. For more than twenty years, she has worked in global health across Mexico, India, the United States, and beyond. But here’s what actually defines her: She is someone who became expert at telling other people’s stories only to realize, partway through her career, that she didn’t know how to tell her own. That realization changed everything.
The Year She Stopped Taking Pictures
Sara grew up crying about injustice. By college, she was studying Africa and Latin America at Duke, trying to understand systems of suffering. By her twenties, she knew: good intentions weren’t enough.
Then came India. A year in Gujarat with the Self Employed Women’s Association documenting a childcare program through photography and writing. She built trust with mothers who worked in tobacco factories and fields, listened to stories of toddlers in dust, infants in hundred-twenty-degree heat, five-year-olds left alone.
Sara wanted to capture strength and resilience, not misery. But questions accumulated. Her interpreter didn’t respect the people they interviewed. She sat with a mother describing trauma and didn’t know how to support her. One year planted a seed: storytelling required more than good intentions.
That realization deepened through her Master’s in Public Health at UNC and work in Mexico and Nicaragua documenting abortion restrictions. Each role reinforced that stories mattered. But she kept facing the same problem: the person telling the story rarely had to answer to the person living it.
Then came COVID. An international move. An unraveling. Sara rebuilt as an independent consultant, finally asking what she actually wanted her work to be. Storytelling was the thread running through everything. And she realized she’d spent two years helping others tell their stories while keeping her own locked away.
The breakthrough came on LinkedIn. She started posting consulting reality. Months without income. Borrowed money. Unpaid credit cards. Depression. The gap between projected success and lived messiness. Other consultants responded: Me too. I thought I was the only one.
By sharing her story, Sara finally modeled what she’d been teaching: authentic stories build connection.
Stories as Power-Shifting
Today, Sara runs her consulting practice from Italy, working with nonprofits and foundations across global health. She co-founded The Understory, a membership community for collective learning. Her goal: help organizations tell stories without extracting from those whose lives are documented.
“True leadership requires humility and a willingness to share power,” she says. This is her operating principle. She teaches organizations not to craft better stories about beneficiaries, but to shift the camera into other hands.
Most organizations speak to the same audiences: funders who already understand, people who already agree. “If we want to make real change, we have to communicate beyond our echo chambers,” she wrote. “We need to tell stories that invite curiosity from those who might not agree with us.”
Her approach centers participatory storytelling, trauma-informed practice, and dignity as non-negotiable. She treats storytelling as ethical practice, not communications tactic.
Rushed timelines kill dignity. When nonprofits need donor reports by Friday, dignity gets cut. “One powerful way to reduce harm is changing our timeline,” she’s written. “Collect stories when it makes sense for you and the story holder.”
Organizations she works with reach beyond existing supporters. They build storytelling capacity. They shift from extractive to participatory models.
But her deeper work is this: stories change what people believe is possible. “If we want to change the world, we first need to change how people think. Stories inspire people to imagine beyond the limits of their worldview.”
This belief runs through everything she does. It’s why she teaches “Storytelling for Bridging Divides.” It’s why she emphasizes listening. It’s why she shares struggles openly. Each action shifts whose voices are centered, whose experience counts, whose reality becomes official.
The Gómez Playbook: 5 Lessons
Listen first, persuade second. Most leaders jump straight to making their case. Sara starts by understanding who she’s talking to, what they believe, and where openings for connection exist. Listening isn’t a tactic. It’s respect in motion.
Good intentions are not enough. You can care deeply and still cause harm if you don’t examine the power dynamics in your storytelling. Check for discomfort. Ask whether you’re the right person to hold the camera. Assume nothing about what someone needs or wants to share.
Rushed timelines extract dignity. When you need a story by Friday, you stop asking permission correctly. You stop building trust. You prioritize your deadline over their safety. Collect stories continuously, not frantically.
Shift power by shifting whose voice is centered. Don’t ask people to be your subjects. Ask them to be your collaborators. Don’t decide what parts of their story matter most. Let them decide. The person whose story is being told should have final say.
Hope is what motivates action, not despair. Too many stories about social change focus only on problems. People need to see solutions, resilience, and possibility. Stories that paint a picture of what could be create the conditions for people to actually work toward that vision.
The Story She Finally Told
When Sara thinks about the future, she imagines global health organizations run by people with lived experience. Policy determined by those impacted, not just those with funding. A world where the person holding the camera is often the person whose life it documents.
That woman in the small room with the dust in the sunlight? In Sara’s vision, she decides how her story is told. She frames it, interprets it, controls it. The outsider with tools becomes a supporter, not the architect. Power shifts.
Sara knows she can’t force this through mandate. Stories don’t work that way. But you can model it. Someone who built a career on telling stories stops and admits: I need to listen more. I need to share this power.
She does this every day. In consulting work. In her community. In posts where she talks about months without income, depression, the loneliness of building alone. She tells stories as power-shifting, which means telling the stories that scare her most.
That’s what real leadership looks like when you actually mean it: Someone who teaches the world how to tell stories finally gets brave enough to tell her own.
Sara Gómez is the founder of Stories for Collective Change and co-founder of The Understory, based in Tivoli, Italy. She works with nonprofits, NGOs, and foundations across global health to build storytelling capacity and communications strategy that centers dignity, trust, and participatory practice. To connect with Sara or learn more about her work, visit www.saragomezconsulting.com or her LinkedIn profile.
