| No Images? Click here   New Orleans has been the final stop on our Listen To America tour. While in Louis Armstrong Park yesterday, Ani Vrabel met Adam Dawson and Jon Renthrope. They're the co-founders of the Cajun Fire Brewing Company, the first black-owned beer company in the Gulf area.“One day, I remember coming out of class and seeing Jon with gumbo pots on the stove, stirring it,” Adam said, remembering when he and Jon were roommates at the University of Florida. “I said, ‘Jon, are you making gumbo?' He said, ‘Nah, I’m making beer.’ … We were in college, we wanted to drink a little bit better than Natty Light, so we learned some recipes on the internet and we thought we could do it with the gumbo pots. He did, and I was the official taste-tester.” “There’s a rich history of African-American brewing that’s been overshadowed,” Jon said. “It’s slowly starting to find its way back.”  Adam and Jon On Halloween in 2011, their “science experiment” — as Adam called it — became a full-fledged business that they hope will have an impact on the city they call home. “For us, it’s not about beer,” Adam said. “It’s about a lot more, especially being from the city, going through Katrina, seeing the change in the city and the demographics and the lay of the land. If we can do our own part, being from here, and especially in the neighborhood where we grew up in, if it can impact all our parents’ homes for the better — hey, let’s shoot for it. That’s the goal.” The name Cajun Fire can have several meanings, they said. But it all comes back to their love of New Orleans and its people. “Everybody has a resiliency in them, burning fire, you know, to come back to a city that was flooded — to spend your money, spend your time knowing that it could flood again,” Adam said. “You still had to rebuild. You still had to do what you had to do to keep that fire going and show everybody else in the world that this is the littlest biggest city in the world. It’s the truth.”   And today while on the campus of Tulane University, Akbar Ahmed met Amber Olsen, a businesswoman and community leader in her Mississippi coastal town of Ocean Springs.She has worked hard to make sure she never felt she would have trouble providing for herself, her husband and her three daughters. Then last May, a doctor told her that her youngest daughter, Willow, had a rare disease called multiple sulfatase deficiency. The condition wears out a child's motor and psychological functions for years before eventually leaving them unable to survive, usually before the age of 10. There's no mass-market cure. But there has been successful treatment when families have funded it themselves — for the price of around $2 million. Now Amber is dedicating her time to try to raise that amount through her Warriors for Willow foundation. She said she's doubtful the money will come soon enough to help her own daughter. But she wants to ensure no more families face this kind of nasty surprise. "I didn't believe this could happen," she said.  The sharing economy was supposed to benefit residents. HuffPost partnered with The Lens for an investigation that shows it’s actually accelerating gentrification, making neighborhoods richer and whiter.
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