In partnership with
I built my first website in 1997. Dial-up modem, a GeoCities address I probably couldn't recite today, and one goal: make a place online that felt like home.
That site was Sofrito For Your Soul. Before "content creator" was a thing, before algorithms decided who got seen, I was just a kid trying to hold onto something — recipes, dichos, the rhythm of a Puerto Rican family because I could feel it slipping the further we got from the island, from the generation before us.
Other than “journaling” or blogging”, I didn't have a word for what I was doing back then. Now I do. I was practicing preservation.
Culture doesn't disappear all at once. It fades.
Nobody wakes up one day and decides to forget where they're from. It happens slower than that. A recipe gets made a little differently each generation because nobody wrote down the amounts. A phrase your abuela used gets translated into something flatter because it doesn't fully exist in English. A holiday tradition quietly becomes "the thing we used to do."
Culture isn't lost in dramatic moments. It's lost in small omissions… the story that didn't get told at dinner, the question that didn't get asked while someone was still alive to answer it.
That's the real stakes of storytelling. It's not decoration. It's not "content." It's the difference between a culture that gets carried forward and one that gets flattened into a museum plaque.
Story is the only technology that's ever actually worked for this
Think about it. Before we had books, before we had the internet, before we had anything… we had story. Someone sat a kid down and said, "Let me tell you about your abuela." That's it. That was the whole system. And it worked for thousands of years because story does something facts alone can't do: it makes you feel like you were there.
You can hand someone a fact… "our family is from a small town in Puerto Rico" and it'll sit in their head for about ten seconds. But tell them the story of your tío walking three miles to a payphone to call home, or your mother learning English from telenovelas, and suddenly it's not information anymore. Es una herencia. We carry it differently. They tell it to somebody else.
That's what I mean when I say community is the real algorithm. Long before platforms existed, our stories were already going viral… kitchen to kitchen, porch to porch, generation to generation.
We just called it "hearing it from your people."
Every Cultivator is doing this work whether they realize it or not
If you're building something online right now… a page, a podcast, a newsletter, a following. I want you to sit with this: you are not just making content. You are, whether you meant to or not, deciding what gets remembered.
Every time you tell your story instead of somebody else's version of it, you're doing preservation work. Every time you post in your language, cook the dish the way it was actually taught to you, use the word your family uses instead of the "correct" one… you're keeping something alive that could just as easily be forgotten.
This is bigger than growth metrics. This is bigger than "finding your niche." When you tell your story honestly, you're not just building an audience. You're building an archive. Somebody's grandkid is going to find your post one day the way I hope somebody finds mine and it's going to tell them who they came from.
What I've learned after almost thirty years of doing this
The platforms change. GeoCities became blogs became podcasts became whatever we're all doing now. I've been hacked, I've lost entire archives, I've had to rebuild from nothing more than once. If you've been following me for a while, you know that story.
But here's what never changed: the moment somebody tells me a piece of your story landed on their timeline and made them call their mom, or ask their abuela a question they'd never thought to ask… that's the whole point. That's the work.
Platforms are rented land. Story is what you actually own. It's the one thing that survives the hack, the algorithm change, the app that shuts down next year.
So tell it. Not the polished version. Not the version optimized for reach. The real one… the one with the accent still in it, the one that sounds like your kitchen.
Somebody's future is going to need to hear it.
Now it’s your turn…
What's one story from your family… a recipe, a phrase, a memory…. that only exists because somebody kept telling it?
Start there. That's your first post. That's the seed.
Then share it with me so I can share it with the world.
As I am…
George Torres
Your Friendly Neighborhood Jibaro.
A few days back… I brought back my interview series… Siembra Sessions with a conversation with Bronx community leader “Tio Maxi” founder of the Rainbow Garden. I made a creative choice to not edit the podcast as I strongly felt that this story needed to be told on his terms and not mine. It is not optimized for reach… it is just his story, un-cut and unedited.
Follow the channel while you are there….
Call To Action: Funding Your Story, Where Creators Are Actually Getting Money in 2026
Every storyteller hits the same wall: the vision is clear, the budget isn't. Good news — the funding landscape for creators, especially creators of color, has real money moving right now. Here's where to start looking.
🎬 For Latino & diverse storytellers
NALIP has run funding pipelines for Latino content creators for over 27 years — directors can land production grants as large as $45,000 to create proof-of-concept short films, and the org runs incubators across producing, writing, and narrative film. The NALAC Fund for the Arts is the only national grant program built exclusively for Latinx/é artists and arts organizations in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. NALIPNALAC
🎥 For film & video projects
The Adobe Film & TV Fund is putting nearly $10 million in grants and product donations toward diverse storytellers worldwide in 2026. Also worth a look: Cinereach, which awards $5,000–$50,000 per project across any production stage, twice a year. AdobeNalip
✍️ For writers
Rise2Write curates a running list of grants for novels, memoirs, and screenplays from underrepresented writers.
📋 The one-stop shop
Grants for Creators publishes a weekly roundup — currently tracking 131 active grants for U.S.-based creatives totaling roughly $3.95M. Bookmark it and check monthly. Grantsforcreators
💰 Crowdfunding, when you want your audience to fund you directly
Kickstarter and Seed&Spark (film-specific) remain the go-to platforms for pre-selling a project to the community that already believes in it.
Cultivators: pick one link above, spend 20 minutes on it this week, and put a deadline on your calendar. Funding follows action, not perfection.
Now A Word From Our Sponsor
The best influencer marketing advice never comes from a report
Think about the last thing that got you fired up about your job this year. Odds are it didn't come from a report. It came from someone who does the job, saying what happened when they tried it.
So we've filled a day with people like that.
Maya Shaff, ŌURA. Leah Walker, Adobe. Georgia Humphries, Stanley 1913. Enara Roy, Halfday. Tyler Vaught, Edelman. Josh Rangel, Ogilvy. Sarah Whittle, ex-Crocs and Duolingo.
And that's just the first wave of speakers.
Return on Influence Festival '26 is a free, virtual day dedicated to influencer marketing. Like any good festival, there are stages. But no mud, no queues, and absolutely no porta-potties.
Sign up today, and the rest of the lineup lands in your inbox first.