OUR TEAM
Born and raised in Houston, Texas, we’re a hometown team driven by community, integrity, and a passion for what we do. Get to know the faces behind our work.
Juan Elizondo
Educator| Environmental Steward | Filmmaker Founder of HTX Voices
Vocational Department Chair, Furr High School
Website: Amigotonytx.com
Facebook: Maestro Verde
Email: JuanElizondo@UTexas.edu
Juan Elizondo is a Houston-born educator, filmmaker, and community partnership leader whose work connects environmental education, career preparation, service learning, and storytelling. A native of Houston’s East End, he has spent more than a decade at Furr High School helping young people develop the skills, experiences, and confidence to become active stewards and leaders within their communities.
At Furr High School, Elizondo leads programming within Career and Technical Education Agriculture and the Environmental and Natural Resources pathway. His students learn beyond the classroom through conservation, habitat restoration, sustainable agriculture, community service, and partnerships with organizations such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Houston Parks and Recreation Department, and other environmental and community partners. His approach emphasizes learning by doing and provides students with meaningful experiences they can carry into college, careers, resumes, and professional portfolios.
Elizondo’s work in education is informed by an equally strong background in media and storytelling. He studied Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin with a focus on documentary and journalism production. His early professional experiences included an internship with the Houston Chronicle photography department and international documentary work with Students of the World in India and Kosovo.
For more than a decade, Elizondo has also continued his environmental service and leadership with The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, participating in agricultural and fruit-tree planting projects throughout Latin America, including Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. He continues to volunteer internationally during the summer, working alongside communities to support sustainable agriculture and food-producing landscapes. During these projects, he also contributes multimedia storytelling and documentation through photography, video, and written narratives that help share the people, experiences, and impact behind the work.
Beyond the classroom, Elizondo remains connected to agriculture through his family farm in East Texas, where he continues to practice land stewardship, conservation, and sustainable agriculture.
Throughout his career, Elizondo has focused on creating opportunities that connect schools with the communities around them. His leadership has contributed to the development of community gardens, school-based conservation projects, environmental service-learning experiences, internships, and partnerships that allow students to apply their education to meaningful work.
His recognitions include the 2015 USDA Abraham Lincoln Honor Award for Diversity, Inclusion and Outreach, the 2016 U.S. Forest Service Regional Forester’s Making a Difference Award, and the 2017 Texas A&M AgriLife Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Partnership for the Green Ambassadors program he created. In 2024, he was also recognized as Teacher of the Year.
From 2016 to 2023, Elizondo served in leadership roles supporting partnerships and grant implementation for Furr High School’s participation in the XQ Super School Project. Through this work, he helped develop educational experiences connecting career preparation, community partnerships, internships, environmental learning, and innovative approaches to student engagement.
Drawing from both his educational and filmmaking backgrounds, Elizondo founded HTX Voices, a youth-centered storytelling initiative created to document and uplift the experiences, accomplishments, and contributions of young people and their communities.
Today, his work with HTX Voices focuses on highlighting students as they participate in service-learning and environmental projects throughout Houston. Through documentary storytelling, interviews, photography, and video, students are encouraged to reflect on their experiences, communicate what they have learned, and take pride in seeing themselves represented through leadership, service, environmental stewardship, and positive contributions to their communities.
For Elizondo, education extends beyond preparing students for their next class or graduation. It is about helping young people recognize that they already have the ability to contribute, lead, tell their own stories, and become ambassadors for the communities they call home.
Luis Angel Cruz
Media Producer • Entrepreneur • Director • HTX Multimedia Production
Luis Cruz is a Houston-born and raised media producer, entrepreneur, and visual storyteller whose work focuses on community-centered filmmaking, multimedia production, and creating opportunities for young people to develop professional media skills.
Cruz developed an early interest in technology, design, and visual storytelling that eventually led him into professional multimedia production. His experience spans video production, photography, editing, graphic design, digital storytelling, and project leadership, with an emphasis on using media to make community stories accessible, engaging, and meaningful.
Cruz played a central leadership role in the development of the HTX Voices internship program at Furr High School. During the program’s grant-funded years, he served as a director and lead trainer, helping oversee multimedia productions while providing hands-on instruction to student interns. He trained young people in camera operation, editing, photography, interviewing, production workflow, and professional storytelling while guiding them through real-world projects that allowed them to build experience and portfolios.
That work helped establish a model in which young people were not simply introduced to media production but were given opportunities to participate in meaningful projects connected to their schools and communities.
Today, Cruz continues his professional work through HTX Multimedia Production, where he develops multimedia content and collaborates on educational, community, and environmental storytelling projects throughout Houston.
His ongoing collaboration with Juan Elizondo, Furr High School, and HTX Voices helps document and uplift students as they participate in environmental education, service learning, conservation, and community-based projects. Through interviews, documentary footage, photography, and short-form storytelling, Cruz helps capture students actively serving their communities while also encouraging them to reflect on their experiences and communicate their own perspectives on camera.
These collaborations have included storytelling and media projects connected to organizations such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Houston Parks and Recreation Department, ACTS (Achieving Community Tasks Successfully), Houston ISD schools, Texas A&M University, and other community and environmental partners.
Cruz also collaborates with Elizondo on selected environmental and nonprofit storytelling projects through HTX Multimedia Production, bringing together professional media production and firsthand knowledge of the communities and organizations being documented.
At the center of Cruz’s work is a belief that media can do more than capture an event. It can help people understand the work happening in their communities, give young people opportunities to see themselves represented through leadership and service, and preserve stories that might otherwise go unseen.
Through HTX Multimedia Production and his continued collaboration with HTX Voices, Cruz remains committed to using film, photography, and multimedia storytelling to amplify community voices, highlight positive impact, and create meaningful connections between people and the stories around them.