Helen Alonzo Hurtado is the co-executive director of Las Fotos Project (LFP), a nonprofit that elevates the voices of teenage girls and gender-expansive youth from communities of color through photography and mentoring. Since the club’s inaugural 2022 season, LFP has partnered with Angel City on the Artists in Residence Program, where four students got the opportunity to photograph Angel City games under the guidance of adult mentors; this year, the Artists in Residence program is expanding to include two cohorts of four students each. In 2024, the partnership grew to include lifestyle product photography.
The partnership is supported by NYX Professional Makeup through ACFC’s 10% partnership model, where 10% of all corporate partnership dollars are reallocated to community organizations.
AngelCity.com caught up with Helen to learn about the roots of the partnership and the impact it has had on LFP’s students.
AngelCity.com: Let’s go back to the beginning. Why did you want to connect Angel City and Las Fotos Project, and how did that connection happen?
Helen Alonzo Hurtado: I grew up playing soccer. I started when I was seven years old and played all the way through high school. I played AYSO and I always wanted to play club, but my family didn't have the financial means for me to be on the travel team, so I just played high school soccer. I grew up in the era of the 99ers, you know, watching it on TV.
The previous women's league [Women’s Professional Soccer, which existed from 2009–2011] had the Los Angeles Sol, and Marta was on that team. I wanted to go so badly to a game, but I was younger and no one would take me. And then when the NWSL started, LA didn't have a team, so I picked Seattle Reign to be my team. I even went up to Seattle to go to games.
So when Angel City was announced, I was just so excited that LA was going to get an NWSL team, which I thought was overdue.
When the club was announced, what stood out to me was the woman-majority ownership. To me, that already showed the value in alignment with LFP. Our whole staff is women and gender-expansive, our board is all women and gender-expansive-led, and that's very rare to see in a nonprofit organization. I think seeing that investment from other women into women's sports, I thought, “this is what's going to change things,” very similar to what LFP does. We always talk about how we're going to revolutionize a male-dominated photography industry.
So from the beginning, I was trying to find a way to collaborate because I knew there was value alignment. One thing that’s been exciting about connecting with the club, especially in these last couple of years, is the ACFC roster does skew very young, which I love, because I think it's value alignment [with LFP]: it's about giving those young players the opportunity to learn, maybe make some mistakes, and then they really step up. We just saw that this past weekend, right? So that’s something I love about this club, is that continued investment in young women and gender-expansive youth.
ACFC: How did you end up with Las Fotos?
HH: My background is in arts education, and I'm a self-taught photographer. My family had an old camera, and I taught myself in junior high. Growing up, I wanted to be a National Geographic photographer, to go out and travel and photograph, but I didn’t really know what it meant—like, how do you get a job like that? In college, I wrote for UCLA's Latino student newspaper and I was trying to figure out what a career in journalism looked like. I had a mentor there who saw that I was passionate about education and students and mentorship and they pointed me towards arts education. Then I found myself in museums, and it kind of put me down the career path I have now.
I started at Las Fotos Project as a volunteer in 2018. I was in grad school getting my master's in public administration. I took a class on fund development, and the professor challenged us to raise funds for a nonprofit that we liked. I had been wanting to volunteer with LFP for a while, but working full-time, I hadn’t had time, so this was a perfect opportunity. I messaged the general inbox and the executive director and founder, Eric Ibarra, he invited me to come over, and I told him what I was doing. That very same evening, he made me an LFP email address and let me loose to start fundraising. I think I raised like, $4,000. That was such a unique learning experience, and it's how I got plugged in with LFP.
Eric asked me once if I would ever join the team at LFP, but he didn’t have a job for me at that time—it was just him right running the organization. I kept volunteering for like a year and one day he said, “I got this grant. I think we can make something work. Are you ready to run our social enterprise?” And the rest is history.
ACFC: What impact has the ACFC partnership had on LFP and the youth you serve?
HH: Working with ACFC has been the most unique experience I’ve had at LFP. When people think about investing in our youth, it's so easy to be like, “okay, it's just a field trip and that's it,” but the approach with Angel City is that it's not just a fieldtrip—it’s a concerted investment in our youth to provide them the experiences and the training to make them competitive in the photo industry, specifically in the sports photo industry.
Getting to work alongside photographers like Will [Navarro, Angel City’s team photographer] and the female photographers on the freelance team, like Jen [Flores] and Bailey [Holiver], is transformative. Both of them have been in positions that our students find themselves in, just putting themselves out there, and it's not until someone opens a door for you—like Will networked with them and remembered them and said, “hey I have this opening”—for me that's what this residency is. It's that opening. The fact that our students can start so much younger and have access to professional equipment, and they're walking away with portfolios and experience that they can leverage no matter where they go—I'm excited for the day when one of our alumni joins the Angel City photo team permanently!
It's already amazing to see the impact that ACFC has made in the lives of our students. Our student Ketzally, she did the Artists in Residence program in 2022, and she realized sports was something she really enjoys. She did the SOAR internship with Angel City, and the person that she reported to at ACFC connected her to her network, and now she's working on the San Diego FC in MLS, in their marketing department. When you see ACFC's investment in our youth, it's not just about the field trips, not even just about Artists in Residence, it’s connecting them to opportunities and where even staff at ACFC are opening their own professional networks to make sure youth are uplifted.
ACFC: Anything exciting on the horizon?
HH: On Saturday, May 17th, Las Fotos Project is throwing a quinceañera, because our organization is turning 15 years old. We're going to be releasing our new branding that evening, stepping into a more mature, elevated look, and the little girl in the logo is going away, to better represent our gender-expansive youth.
The quince is really just going to be a celebration of the past 15 years of LFP and of what's to come. We’re going to have all the typical quince elements: the baile de sorpresa, we have our madrinas. We're going to do a ton of photo ops, because we wouldn't be LFP without many glamor stations and photo booths and portrait sessions. It's going to be at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, and it's our first big celebration of this scale since 2019. We’re completely sold out of tickets, but folks can keep an eye out for our upcoming line of merch featuring the new branding.
And I think for me, it's kind of the beginning of stepping into my leadership as the new executive director of Los Fotos Project next January, because I can't hide behind the scenes anymore! So we’re just very excited.
