In the first of our six-part #WealthInColor video series – featuring Black, Latinx and Native American founders – Ayla Bystrom-Williams of Honeymoon Brewery shares her entrepreneurial journey. She discusses the business landscape in New Mexico, the challenges of raising capital and finding advisors, and how Honeymoon Brewery is breaking barriers to make some of the best hard kombucha in the country.

For the past several months, members of Living Cities’ Start Up, Stay Up, Scale Up team have spoken with entrepreneurs of color in and around our partner cities, including Albuquerque, San Francisco and New Orleans. The goal of these conversations was to hear about their experiences, get a sense of their challenges, and learn how they are scaling their local businesses – for themselves and for their communities.

We hope that Ayla’s video and the Honeymoon Brewery story, as well as the other videos in this series, will have relevance for other entrepreneurs, for investors, for those working in philanthropy, and for others serving roles in local and regional entrepreneurial ecosystems that connect founders to capital and community resources.

Be on the lookout for other stories of success, coming soon, that feature a non-profit-serving entrepreneur, a real estate developer, a comic book publisher, a couple who have created the “AirBnB of barber shops and beauty salons,” and a government tech founder.

If you would like to learn more about Start Up, Stay Up, Stay Up, browse our previous blog posts on the effort from our local partners. And if you plan to be at SOCAP this year, stop by our panel on October 24, 2019, concerning “Connecting Founders of Color to Capital and Community.